Border, Edge, Frame Rios/Ledezma
Comfort Station / This Is Now A Magazine / Curated by Anthony Romero / Also featuring Laurel Foglia & Brandon Alvendia / Chicago IL / 2013
Part I.
Consider the edge of the photograph, for example. As an example of what? I will leave that up to you. But consider it as an example of some “thing,” because it is a “thing,” and as a “thing” can be made into an example. I am referring to that part of the photographic object created when the paper continues past the depiction, that zone surrounding the image in a rectilinear and minimalist embrace of whiteness. Why does the paper extend into nothing? Why is it so blank and alienated? Did nobody tell the print that the image had come to an end, that there is nothing—no shadow, no index—left for it to hold, that, as a border, edge, and frame, it is on the other side of the representational system?
My first camera was my father’s last. It was a Canon AE-1 35mm that had been to Vietnam and back. At least I thought it had. At the time I first saw it, the camera looked old enough to have been to war. But factually it was not possible. Production of the AE-1 began a year after the fall of Saigon. My photographic fantasy would have come to an end there, if I let facts ruin a story. My facts have nothing to do with days, months, and years. I held the same camera my father held as he photographed his buddies, both American and Vietnamese, as he photographed cumulus clouds twisting in an unknown sky from a helicopter, from behind a machine gun. He looked through its viewfinder and I looked through its viewfinder. Is what we each saw radically different?
What does this photographic edge, this border, have to do with the characters, cities, or situations that find themselves trapped in a viewfinder, trapped in a point of view? Like all borders it emerges as a detached and natural fact that exists most convincingly as a public idea. And as a severe and hard edge, this border, edge, and frame is related to the sharp part of everything made in the desire to conquer, delineate, and categorize. The photographic image is held in its place through the violence of this border’s precision, through a voided zone that instantiates stability and intelligibility. This border defines the materiality of the picture, while being nothing in particular. It is the part you put the tacks through so as not to destroy the image.
The camera had a zoom. I lay across my bed and pointed it out the window; an act of transgression that fell under the protection of a technology and practice— “photography.” I watched birds alight on the top of our chain link fence, but my looking did not stop at the fence. My vision continued through and past the links, bringing more and more of the world toward me and inside me. I watched our neighbors beautifying their lawn: digging up the dirt, planting a bed of roses around a wishing well, sitting in outdoor furniture, observing their work with satisfaction. They never did anything particularly interesting, but I watched anyway. I watched them as they watched their grass grow and as they mowed it down.
Part II.
Part III.
Part IV.
Part V.
Part VI.
Photographs taken during the performance by the photographer of something other than the performance.
Epilogue
Cut photographs inside Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida.
This is an imaginative reinvigoration of a performance through the act of preparing its documentation for publication and distribution. It is proof that a particular event occurred in a given place, at a given time, and in front of a given group; but it is also more. It is the final event in that performance. It is performance itself. Certain objects and actions are depicted as they existed, but other types of images are included as well, images made in advance of the performance or after the fact. As such, this is as much evidenciary as it is extraevidenciary. It is both verification and fiction.