A kind of philosophy
I spent a lot of time walking the streets of New York. I lived there for a long while, you see. I had little money and little inclination to nurse a cappuccino in a corner coffee shop. In those days, I had no camera either—no point & shoot, no cellphone—but I took everything in with my eyes soft focus. Remembering. Years later, I did get a camera, and I returned to New York to walk those same streets. And I took a lot of shots with it. A lot.
A door, and wall, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
It was around that time, immersed in the writings of Samuel Beckett, that I learned about the notion of antistasis. What is antistasis? Well, it's a literary technique, used in poetry but also in other forms of writing, where the repetition of a word or series of words bends the meaning of a phrase, or sentence, to the point that the rhythm itself can create a new kind of continuity—a new idea. For dramatic or emotional effect. "Working hard or hardly working?" some ask. "Nothing will come of nothing," says King Lear.
Repetition. Rhythm. Return. All in the pursuit of a certain meaning, or twist on meaning. I walk. I shoot a photo. I shoot another photo. I walk again, I shoot again. It's so important, I basically use the word as my Instagram handle. Ha ha, but no kidding.
Yet nothing is that easy, or final, no. Because antistasis, if you put a hyphen in it, can also mean a rejection of the static. To be against stasis. Which is also important in my work. In all aspects of photography and filmmaking, I try to embrace the dynamic, the always changing. To look, listen, adapt to what's right in front of me. The point of life isn't to be satisfied, because you will never be satisfied. Who wants that anyway? The point, rather, is to harness those feelings of dissatisfaction in a tremendously active way. To move onward. To imagine and create new things.
A sidewalk on the Lower East Side.
This is what I try to do with the camera. I'm capturing moments. Freezing them. But also living in them, with an awareness and consciousness of how those moments might fit together. "Set me where you stand," Lear also says. I don't like to give unwanted advice. But if I could return to the younger me walking those streets of New York, I might whisper in his ear: "Don't look for satisfaction. Look for the surprising. The wild, the bewildering. Point your camera there."
