rhl-oregon
Cameras Guitars Wonders
RFF friends, I'm including the notice for my exhibit opening tomorrow here in Eugene (though I will be flying to NYC for a wedding and (just as important!) lunch with RFFers at Pho Bang on Saturday. Anyone in driving distance to Eugene, let me know--I would be happy to meet you and discuss the show over coffee.
Below is the introductory text for the exhibit, which features a mix of framed 5x7, 8x10, 11x14, 16x20. Its 26 images are also linked in viewing order in a Flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/9540373@N06/sets/72157640893504135/
I would be glad to hear your comments and critiques in this thread or via PM.
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* An aging son’s tender regard for his mother in the first moment of her afterlife. A young man breakfasting in his mother’s home while just outside she hangs his laundry. (A moment ago she housed him inside her; there, too, she fed him breakfast. He was naked, she was his clothing.)
A birthday balloon tethered to Inca lilies on the grave of a child. An unstrung violin draped with the washed-up egg cases of a sea creature. Shard of a sake cup from Nagasaki 1945. This furrow insinuating through a field to vanish in winter fog; that small family of trees beneath a lowering storm, glimpsed at 60mph and 1/500 second on Highway 99 south, a thousand miles ago in the rearview mirror. My dying sister, haloed by my black hat.
Where is the brave man who bore witness in winter rains at the Federal Building on a hunger strike for the unsheltered? The stylish punk haircut with leathers and cigarette delivering a riff on class war by the Post Office? The crippled junkie against a wall in the Tenderloin, flashing a victory sign (over what)? The small boy with one feather in his outflung arms? Where is the horse whose long mane hairs wrap the soprano saxophone in a second silence?
Some of these depictions were just a glimpse—the first moment is the last. Their fraction of a second is their elegy. Others are family, are of long familiarity—there are paper albums and memory chips filled with their journeys, timelines commemorating their visible history That history has an end, though it is not yet in sight. In photographs they do not hold their breath; they stop breathing. They stop breathing long enough for us to cherish the moment we cannot stay, the face we cannot preserve forever.
Omnia quae sunt, sunt lumina. All things that exist are lights. We are accidents with names, nerve bundles animated by illusions and disillusionment, but we are also miraculous participants in the history of light. Each of us is a camera; in the mind’s darkroom, we develop memories. We lie in bed projecting them invisibly on the ceiling, as though an internal Kodak Carousel is cycling through the slides of our years. We breathe in desire, we breathe out loss. We utter prayers for preservation and seek serenity over graves and monuments.
The years are moments. The faces of our dead are now entirely photographic. The mystery is how light renders all of it precious.
Light writes our stories. I record mere fractions of what it exposes and what it conceals in my life. What it outlines and surrounds, what it houses and mothers. What, with incomprehensible serenity, it accompanies into the long shadows, into each leaf of grass.
Below is the introductory text for the exhibit, which features a mix of framed 5x7, 8x10, 11x14, 16x20. Its 26 images are also linked in viewing order in a Flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/9540373@N06/sets/72157640893504135/
I would be glad to hear your comments and critiques in this thread or via PM.
__________________________________________
Preserve Us Our Losses: Moments, Mementos, Memorials
Photographs by Robert Hill Long
February 14-March 13, 2014 / Reception 5-6pm Friday 2/21
February 14-March 13, 2014 / Reception 5-6pm Friday 2/21
Dot Dotson’s Photography, 1668 Willamette Street, Eugene Oregon 97401 10-6 MF, 10-4 Saturdays
* An aging son’s tender regard for his mother in the first moment of her afterlife. A young man breakfasting in his mother’s home while just outside she hangs his laundry. (A moment ago she housed him inside her; there, too, she fed him breakfast. He was naked, she was his clothing.)
A birthday balloon tethered to Inca lilies on the grave of a child. An unstrung violin draped with the washed-up egg cases of a sea creature. Shard of a sake cup from Nagasaki 1945. This furrow insinuating through a field to vanish in winter fog; that small family of trees beneath a lowering storm, glimpsed at 60mph and 1/500 second on Highway 99 south, a thousand miles ago in the rearview mirror. My dying sister, haloed by my black hat.
Where is the brave man who bore witness in winter rains at the Federal Building on a hunger strike for the unsheltered? The stylish punk haircut with leathers and cigarette delivering a riff on class war by the Post Office? The crippled junkie against a wall in the Tenderloin, flashing a victory sign (over what)? The small boy with one feather in his outflung arms? Where is the horse whose long mane hairs wrap the soprano saxophone in a second silence?
Some of these depictions were just a glimpse—the first moment is the last. Their fraction of a second is their elegy. Others are family, are of long familiarity—there are paper albums and memory chips filled with their journeys, timelines commemorating their visible history That history has an end, though it is not yet in sight. In photographs they do not hold their breath; they stop breathing. They stop breathing long enough for us to cherish the moment we cannot stay, the face we cannot preserve forever.
Omnia quae sunt, sunt lumina. All things that exist are lights. We are accidents with names, nerve bundles animated by illusions and disillusionment, but we are also miraculous participants in the history of light. Each of us is a camera; in the mind’s darkroom, we develop memories. We lie in bed projecting them invisibly on the ceiling, as though an internal Kodak Carousel is cycling through the slides of our years. We breathe in desire, we breathe out loss. We utter prayers for preservation and seek serenity over graves and monuments.
The years are moments. The faces of our dead are now entirely photographic. The mystery is how light renders all of it precious.
Light writes our stories. I record mere fractions of what it exposes and what it conceals in my life. What it outlines and surrounds, what it houses and mothers. What, with incomprehensible serenity, it accompanies into the long shadows, into each leaf of grass.

