Michael Ast © 2015
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Category Archives: Journal
Veterans Day, 2015
November 11th, 2015
I was thinking a bunch about Ken today. Ken was a homeless Vietnam War veteran, who I met during my senior year of college in Boston while studying journalism / photojournalism. We established quite a friendship, which evolved into me making a photo essay over several months, with his consent, depicting his daily life that revolved much around collecting recyclables by day and cashing them in each afternoon across the Charles River in Cambridge to buy a meal and alcohol. He had strong bouts of schizophrenia and showed all the signs of PTSD. Ken drove an M84 Patton tank in the war. I spent evenings in his home, built of cardboard walls and plywood, supported by the footing and I-beams of the Harvard / Massachusetts Avenue Bridge in Boston’s Back Bay. The underside of the bridge was his ceiling. I invited him into my apartment. I had a fireplace. I’d make a fire, he appreciated the warmth during Boston’s brutal Winters. We drank a lot of beer, and I listened to him speaking endlessly about his friends killed in the war, his wife that left him on his return, and apparent letters and wired money she sent him each week, and how she was going to come see him. The stories of her rarely added up. I heard the same stories many times. They were so sad, some nights his storytelling was full of hope, but would vanish in the morning, when I’d greet him outside in the back alley of my apartment.
The print here was made the first time Ken showed me his home, taken from the doorway to his shelter. The evenings were warming up in April, Ken was starting to sleep on the ground. There were a few other homeless neighbors. I graduated in May, saw him a handful of times after this portrait was made. I tried for a couple weeks before graduation to say goodbye to him, but couldn’t find him. His shelter was abandoned. I often wonder what happened to him. There’s no way of knowing. He was a really nice guy, severely in trouble, who I was glad to share a friendship with. Looking back, I could’ve done more. At the time, I believed the friendship was enough, just there as someone for him to talk to.
That’s what I’d like to express on this Veterans Day. War is despicable. It isn’t going away. Thank you, veterans, for your sacrifice and courage.
(Photo: Ken – Boston, 1996)
Furlong / Blue Evening – Artist Book by Raymond Meeks
November 3rd, 2015
Needless to say, I slept well last night, after spending time with this gem of an artist book. Raymond Meeks’ “Furlong; Blue Evening” is a beautiful celebration of young adolescence, light, nature, and that seemingly eternal freedom we all tasted and felt in our youth. His hand-made publications are some of the finest artworks I’ve ever sat with. They lure me back to pour over repeatedly through the years. The photographs and their emotive nature are made completely present to us in their exceptionally tactile printing, incorporated with equally palpable repurposed materials to contain them in a transcendental layout and design.
“The artist book is printed with carbon pigment inks to repurposed book paper with spot varnish applied to the prints. Additionally, some prints are made to transparency material and tipped-in, throughout. Includes choice of silver gelatin prints, toned in selenium” (R. Meeks)
Edition of 20 12.5 x 9 inches
Walking / Schoolhouse
October 25th, 2015
I’ve passed by this corner schoolhouse countless times, walking the road named after it. The abiding presence of the abode always slows my stride. Its placement in the wooded landscape, across from the old orchard, is what draws me in. The fieldstone facade angled there above the creek meets the bend in the road in perfect form. The schoolhouse came first. The road’s bend was once a schoolyard.
I have yearned all the times in passing to peer inside. An elder couple has lived in the house since we settled in the neighborhood. Last week a giant dumpster was parked in the dirt drive. Today on my walk I found the dumpster gone and my face pressed against the windows looking in. I could make out handwritten notes left on furniture, “leave this”, “keep for Richard”, “trash”. A fresh pumpkin sits on the front porch, a rocking chair, a blooming mum.
On the small iron table beside the front door a friend, I suppose, from the neighborhood, left a note, already yellowing, “. . . please let me know your new address.” The tone, addressing them by their first names, didn’t help my foreboding concern. I looked in the grass and brush, no fallen Sold sign, no Sale. I walked around the schoolhouse slowly, one lap, making pictures in the October calm. A hydrangea. The dried leaves of the patio grapevine. A Bethlehem star above the original doorway. Some Windsor chairs. The candle chandelier above them. The dining room window. Reflections. Looking again and again through the glass at the old school floor boards, the peeling paint on the wainscoting and crown molding, the residential modifications, the idealized values of the past settled among the disrupted new. A vacuum cleaner was left sprawled in the kitchen, still plugged in. Dirty dishes. Dim light coming from the hallway. A haunting in the history. Yet, all of it has the cliche’ mechanisms of romanticized cinema.
I walked the long way back home, Spinnerstown to Orchard Road, kicking the damp leaves, smelling the ground in the air, feeling a bit hollow – at once, the romantic fool, next the melancholic, always milking or inventing more grief.
(Walking / Schoolhouse, 10.25.15)
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TIS Books – Publisher’s Talk, Philadelphia 10.15.15
October 16th, 2015
Photographers Tim Carpenter, Nelson Chan & Carl Wooley gave an intimate talk last night at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, presenting an inside look into their publishing imprint TIS Books. Already, since their 1st release in spring, they’ve produced 3 solid publications. In April, at Philadelphia’s Art Book Fair, they unveiled their collaborative 4-photobook set TIS01 demonstrating a pensive, meditation on the notion of place, and Steve Smith’s exceptional Waiting Out the Latter Days, employing the clear-sighted, descriptive principles of documentary photography, gazing at Utah’s Mormom culture perpetually “waiting” / fearing the ultimate doom that a once-looming Cold War promised. Smith’s monograph came as a breath of fresh air amid the present photobook scene, which seems a bit over-saturated with conceptual work. Most recently, they published the poetic call and response dialogue of photographer Justine Kurland and poet John Yau in Black Threads from Meng Chiao. Kurland and Yau battle the woes of home-confinement due to the responsibilities of parenting, in Kurland’s instance, now that her young son Casper, her “on-the-road partner”, begins schooling, and Yau who’s been forced to rest and recover after intense surgery. Tim, Nelson and Carl (along with contributing photographer J. Carrier) have some great publications in the pipeline for 2016, certainly one photographer many folks will be happy to find published in an ample-size edition. I’ll keep it a surprise. Each photographer talked about their inspirations growing up and venturing into photography. It’s the background of each of them that lends to such a dynamic collective of minds and makers. Nelson spoke of his admiration for the punk rock, do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos that came with the post-punk scene and such record labels as Dischord Records, Epitaph Records & SST Records. The notion that such successful enterprises were created by musicians / artists confirmed their legitimacy to him. Carl spoke about the influence of cinema, especially from Japanese directors Akira Kurosawa, Yasujirō Ozu, who exemplified the power of editing, sequence and narrative. I concur wholeheartedly with Carl’s admiration of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon! Tim expressed his faith in literature, the idea of writing not only being descriptive, but also evocative, owing inspiration to writers such as Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, John Irving, David Foster Wallace and Marilynne Robinson. Tim also felt a deep connection with music in his early teens and onward, mentioning R.E.M.’s Murmur album affecting his artistic sensibility, (also Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks), with the sparseness and elliptical quality, requiring some work on the audiences behalf to fill in the ambiguities. Hearing the TIS crew’s background and seeing their books demonstrates an exciting, varying batch of publications to come, let alone other endeavors they have going on at their website, including essays by contributors. Keep your eye on This Is Sausage . . . Das Ist Mir Wurst!
TIS01, By Tim Capenter, Nelson Chan, Carl Wooley & J Carrier, 2015
Will Call, 82% Humidity
September 30th, 2015
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