Pike Place Market – A Search for the Truth of Aloneness
Earlier today I was talking to someone about the album of movie ticket stubs I have kept since I was 11 years old. It made me reflect on the reasons why I started it and have kept it going for so many years. Other than my love for film, I think it has a lot to do with the tangible nature of the stubs. Time is intangible and measured only because we chose to measure it, making it something of an illusion. Thinking about that can make you wonder if what happened in the past really did happen or … was it a dream? Or, as Blade Runner explored, was it an implanted memory?
Our memories are also intangible and, additionally, malleable, which is to say our memories are records that are not only flawed, but also incapable of being examined by others. A movie ticket stub is an physical object that can be touched and held. Unforgiven on August 10th, 1992 at 4:10pm at Mann’s Arapahoe Village 4 Cinemas? Yes, here’s the record that that happened. Feel free to examine it.
Photography for me is a tool I use to beat time at its own game. We die alone, which means we also exist alone, whether we are with other people or not. Not being alone is an illusion. How do people respond to this? It’s impossible to see with the naked eye. That’s what the beauty of time gives us, a constant stream of positive illusions that serve as distractions from the truth, which is that isolation is a constant inescapable fact of our existence. My photographs are my attempt to side-step time and expose this truth. Sometimes my revelations are sad. Other times inspiring. It just depends on how my subject chooses to respond to it.
Pike Place Market in Seattle is one of my favorite places on Earth. I have a lot of memories from there when I lived in Seattle during high school and college. I go back to reminisce, but also to bask in a convergence of interesting ingredients — artificial light, human commotion, shapes, windows, and goods. It’s an absolute playground for discovering a diversity of responses to the truth of aloneness.
These last two images are a search for something else — a place where light, shape, and color intersect into a design to be exposed by composition.
