October 2007 Archives

POLAROID BOOK

October 25, 2007 2:58 AM

I wrote this text for this book (I wrote one other thing, but I am not going to post it):

A small collection of things looked at (moments of distraction or fragments of a world):  some skies - blue or grey, a street light turning on at dusk, a billboard in the desert, a tree shadow on the sidewalk, a view of the horizon east in the Atlantic or west in the Pacific, a pier in Connie Island, the fog in Santa Monica, a small port-town in North Carolina, a path into trees in Cape Cod, Palos Verdes.


If the tour started on the West Coast and not in Salt Lake City, there would have been polaroids of Wendover, a small town on the Nevada and Utah border.  Here, over half a century ago, the Enola Gay was built and test runs for the atomic bomb droppings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place.  Old weathered barracks that have been abandoned.  An old airplane hangar.  Would anyone know the fertile history of a polaroid of a barren landscape?  


Or looking up at the night sky in the middle of the night at a gas station somewhere a few miles driving past Sand Creek.  The stars look so beautiful here, and they can enthrall you even in the cold.  But if I pointed the camera up all there would be is black.  The stars would never make it into the emulsion.


Now I am on a plane from New York to Reykjavik.  The window faces south over the Atlantic.  It is dawn and the sun is about to rise.  The moon, a waning crescent (almost a new moon), is already above the horizon.  At first I do not realize what it is.  It glimmers with the golden light of a sun that has not yet risen.  All I can comprehend is the light.  Slowly I learn it is the moon.  This reminds me of the line in that John Berger book you showed me.  If I had a camera that could capture this, this visual incomprehension - that is the photograph I would mail you.  Or, at the least, it would be the moon.


David Horvitz

May 2007



Click here for more info on the book, click here to pre-order it.

A PIECE OF THE SKY

October 17, 2007 3:23 AM

ASDF

October 15, 2007 1:53 AM


i wrote this text for a new thing I am doing with Mylinh:  ASDFMAKES


Where are you? I am on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The sun is coming down, or maybe it has already come down.  What cliff?   It is a cliff in Palos Verdes. I don't know the name. Well, I probably do know the name, but that doesn't matter here.  What are you doing there?   I am waiting. I am waiting for a moment. A precise moment. It is the moment when the sea and the sky become indiscernible from each other. When they cease to become two separate entities and are engulfed in a blanket of darkness as night arrives.  A blanket?   Maybe it is not a blanket. Maybe that's the wrong word. A blanket covers, and this is the opposite. It is a removing – a removing of the light. I think that word – a removing –  will suffice here.  And this moment?   Yes, I am waiting for this precise moment. But maybe it's not so precise. Maybe when you've been staring in the dark for too long you can't tell when things aren't really there anymore. That is what I am waiting for: when things lose their presence. When they disappear. It's easy to imagine that things are still there in the dark. Maybe this moment slips by unnoticed. It is probably more a blur than a definite point. Yes, a blur. Somewhere in a slow dissolve.  And can you tell me what is happening now?   The sun has gone down and there is a layer of golden light lingering over the horizon. It is what the sun has left behind. Slowly this glow diminishes, and then darkness.  And so this is your moment?   No, there is still a distinction between the sea and the sky. They are two different shades of darkness. At this moment my attention is meticulously drawn on that line way out there.  The horizon?    Yes. The moment can come any second now, so I keep my eyes open waiting for it to
fade away into disappearance.
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