8402 MEMORY TRAIL

Little four-year-old me, kneeling and singing on a rusty orange-colored carpet in front of a nice stereo system:

I been walkin’ central park, singin’ after dark / People think I’m craa-zay …

A black Pioneer receiver with lots of power, a dual cassette deck, a pair of huge floor-standing speakers, a silver Technics turntable, all enclosed inside of a glass stereo stand with those clicky double magnetic opening doors that also housed hundreds of my parents’ record albums. I guarded the sleek, black felt roller used for cleaning those records and a couple of Indian-head pennies that weighed down the LPs that had begun to warp with my life. Such a loud stereo for such a small space. This was heaven. Next to me, my sock monkey. Behind me, a baby swing for my new sister, my dad’s brown corduroy Laz-E Boy recliner, and under the coffee table, Lincoln Logs left in various states of construction: half a Wild West town built. I sucked at sliding the popsicle stick-ish shingles into the flimsy black plastic ends that bound them together to make rooftops. I often quit out of frustration and would find myself back in this exact spot a few times a day, peering into a multicolored sea of record albums and their contents.

Stumblin’ on my feet, shufflin’ through the street / Askin’ people -chk-chk-chk - whatsa mattah witchu boyy?”

The front cover of the first album that I most often pulled, that I studied, looked like a catalog-style “advertisement” for hairstyles with die-cut, head-shaped openings on top of a movable liner of the Stones themselves underneath who were decked out in drag and Warholian makeup. On the back cover were more “advertisements” of very pointy bras, but in a sketched style. It seemed scandalous for reasons I couldn’t quite grasp, but I was a curious kid, so I just needed to keep looking. Plus, a bonus: I completely loved what I heard - the beats, the words, the voices, and the instruments; I loved the combination of it all.

I wore this album out: the record itself, its cover and its inserts. In fact, I wore many of my parents’ albums out. I listened and handled and looked. I still listen and handle and look, often at those same exact albums. When my parents moved away to Florida, I rescued as many as I could. More than just objects, these albums have marked me as me at many different points in time throughout my life, including the me that I was even just last week. The albums have also been etched into the art that I make, whether that work is a simulated collection of hand-crafted tip-on 12” record albums using my own photographs, at times combined with other appropriated images, or if the work has involved using the actual record covers in some way to make different types of photographs.

I made this “Poekadots” album cover during the spring of 2020. The front side contains Edgar Allan Poe heads photographed from a pencil bag that I used; they are floating over sketches of labeled fashionable collar styles from throughout historical periods appropriated from a found book in my school library. The back cover repeats the floating Poe heads from the front, but I sketched over them in order to form new Poe identities. Soon after I made it, I realized that Some Girls somehow had once again subliminally poked its way through layers of time, back into my life.

Moving forward to a different day around the same time period: add to the scene a large color tube television to the left of the stereo system. I felt the pins and needles of excitement for this channel called MTV; you know, the version of MTV when music videos were the only concentrated content delivered. We had it, newly spliced into our house. Again, finding myself among the albums, I held onto another favorite, my eyes glued to the screen.

How could you just keep me standing / Alone in a world so cold (world so cold) / Maybe I’m just like my father … too bold.

This guy was interesting. He had really cool pants. I also liked his flowy white scarf. He sported a little mustache that was not Tom Selleck-esque, like my dad’s; he had one that was instead pencil-thin. It looked to me like it was drawn on. Right then, on the TV, he lounged around in some weeds near a pond with a motorcycle and a woman and sang something dramatic about doves crying, and then a bevy of doves flew around erratically. Wait - was that a quick pan to the same face on the poster that I found folded inside of the album I was holding? Uh huh. When my mom caught me watching this little snippet of this music video, she quickly flipped the television off, and I do understand why now - but then, it didn’t matter. I’d wonder why she did that and then would turn it back on as soon as she turned and left so that I could take in more favorites from David Bowie, Madonna, The Police, Genesis, and The Cars. I wanted to be INSIDE of these videos. They were like scenes from the fairy tales that I loved. I wanted to create my own, and I did in my own ways in years following - with my sisters, with my neighbors, for school talent shows. I still create with them in mind many years later but through photography.  While I am much more aware of the visual and conceptual influences that records and music continue to have on me; at times direct, and at others, more subtle, I am still sometimes surprised at how these influences creep into my present-day work.

Fittingly, my parents’ Purple Rain was used to create this portrait while in my fifth semester as an MFA student. It is a self-portrait of sorts, but the concept for this project was to make photographs that used chance via a sort of photographic decalcomania with an original portrait that I made transferred onto plexi in combination with a found pattern, either from an old book or an album cover, to make a new photograph that paralleled Gertrude Stein’s ideas on insistence.

Records. There are so many kinds of records. We have historical records, permanent records, world records, and personal records; we record-keep, we record sound, we learn to play recorders around 4th grade, we record shows, and a vinyl record acts as a vessel that holds sound recordings. So what? What does this have to do with anything, and what does it have to do with photography? That is a complicated thing to answer, but I guess it has to do with the cross-temporal qualities that these photographic objects hold, and it also relates to the above multiple uses and connotations of the word “record” itself. Most types of records relate to marking points in time, sometimes encapsulating them, and many are parts of collections that are able to spur recollection personally, collectively, and also, a multiplicity of times.

When I hear certain records playing, or if I see the cover art, something sparks and illuminates very specific points in time for me, those where I heard or saw the albums, and they evoke certain feelings and memories surrounding those times. When this happens, the inside of my head morphs into my own personal slide projector. Sometimes the projected images are memories of actual photographs I have seen, but mostly, the images are related to what I remember from whatever it was that I was immersed in during those times, and what I was experiencing in those moments.

Vinyl records contain etchings of sound, which is most certainly a type of record, and photographs are actually visual etchings: of the past, of moments, of identities, and even of an artist’s ideas. Like a traditional photographic portrait, a record collection and its specific contents can also be a portrait of a person, of a group of people, of a time. The cross-temporal quality that photographs and records both hold are most interesting to me and have to be my earliest artistic influences. There is some sort of symbiotic relationship between music, photography, and myself. I see the world in still photographs. I always have. If I could speak in photographs,  I believe that at most times, I would. And when I finally decided to give myself a chance to do that, I started to. The photo-based work that I have made and continue to make is either directly or indirectly influenced by my earliest experiences with records, sometimes literally but always conceptually. Everything is centered around it. Both photographs and records contain layers and layers of meaning and time. They spur recollection. And they work together well to do this.

Back to the orange carpet with little me. Another day’s choice: Boy.

A boy tries hard to be a man / His mother takes him by his hand / If he stops to think he starts to cry, oh why?

Fast forward more than two decades. On this day: my own 4 year old little boy.

Fast forward one last time, to a bit over another decade more. I never thought about it until just now, but that house, those records, and little me, we were at the end of a gravel road named Memory Trail. Some might say that has to be coincidence. Right now, I just don’t think so.