Addressing the Vest » Notes

The most terrifying fact about the universe

Ross Evertson — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:20:47 +0000

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

—Stanley Kubrick

Again.

Ross Evertson — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:11:41 +0000

There are the memories of making of a photograph, and then there is everything that comes after. All of those times you turned to it for whatever it originally meant. Each time it transforms under your gaze, it becomes what you need it to be (or the last thing you need it to be, depending). Every viewing adds another layer of obstruction, building and changing and shifting its meaning. Sometimes that all gets peeled away and you are left with that original feeling, but more often than not you are left with a response caked in meaning with no quick and easy way back. You could start sanding it down and remove the strata—but everyone hates sanding.

Brothers

Ross Evertson — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 20:53:56 +0000

Most images are still sitting latent on a piece of plastic, buried in a few layers of chemicals, waiting to be resolved. It has been over two months, and the two cameras that made those images have hardly made any others. It is a struggle to finish off the rolls inside of them, knowing that once they are finished and replaced I will be compelled to develop them.

This one was made and seen instantly. It sat on my phone, though, and was quickly hidden by the dozens and hundreds of random images that followed. It was taken moments after the last moments of my brother’s life. If it is anything at all, it is a representation of the texture of a moment in an intensive care unit, more than it is anything about a man.

To have documents of this moment are a curse, first. To be in the presence of that event—to witness something slip away that you never thought would leave you—is humbling and exhausting. The compulsion to document it felt almost callous, but when you are in that state, unsure of what you might have left, you want to make more. You want to have more pieces of that person, even if they seem overly morbid or forlorn. It was my last chance, in a sense, to make something about the two of us.

Documenting death, then, was the most dramatic way of illustrating that need to represent myself in something else. Seeking immortality in a moment—injecting myself or my way of seeing into a situation that is beyond me (and, well, they are almost all beyond me).

Again, then, this isn’t a representation of my brother. It is a reflection of a circumstance that I imagine none of us would ever choose, even though he did, ostensibly. For me, it does not even bring up his memory beyond those few days in that hospital. The smells and noises in that room, the food in the cafeteria, the moments with my family that spanned from pure grief to optimism and back, hearing nurse after nurse talk about levels of versed.

I am, on some levels, terrified of getting the film back. Just as I am about all of my feelings surrounding this. Learning to address these things, and the relics of these events is something we all have to face at some point. From well-loved pets to our spouses and our closest friends, we are impossibly lucky to have people worth mourning—which is a small consolation.

If nothing else, this image and possibly the others, give a context for myself to feel comfortable sharing certain thoughts about an otherwise astonishing and paralyzing tragedy.

I love and miss you, brother.

A rat faced dog and a muddy floor

Ross Evertson — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:05:58 +0000

One photograph, ostensibly about nothing at all and maybe seven years old, made me want to write thousands of words. I was compelled to tell the story of the moment, everything that had led to that moment, and everything that came afterwards. I wanted to describe how all of that described me, how all of those things before and after made an awful lot of awful sense—and that things that had happened since might have been misunderstood, but were really just surrounded by other pictures of good things. Even when I was in the middle of some personal tragedy, feeling overly dramatic, they were still pictures of good things.

Instead I described something much more finite, instead I told just the story of why there was a rat faced dog on such a muddy floor.

45ish miles and 1ish photograph

Ross Evertson — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 15:09:47 +0000

And a poor one from the phone, again, of course.

I would say that “I don’t know what happened.” How could I go on a 3 hour ride and only take a single crappy iPhone photo—how I could travel to Nebraska and the only photograph I come home with is one someone else takes? I started to write that, but really—I know exactly what happened.

It was a culmination of frustration, self-doubt, a loss of identity, a lack of understanding and purpose in my work. The things that usually bother all of us at any given moment became what making work was about. The ideas never stopped coming, but the psychological and emotional elements of my process were snubbed out by my insecurities.

I busied myself with fretting about things rather than making them. I wrote a lot, and looking back I did take more photographs than it felt like I was at the time, but the substance of what makes my work mine wasn’t there. And of course that just led me even further away from the work, from myself.

It feels good to be working towards what I should, again. Projects that were on the cusp of being something more than ideas are sitting on my desk actually being something. Comps from yesterday and last month and last year are staring at me waiting to become real. Notes and phone numbers and plans are on little orange post-its and they are filling up my heart and mind just the way they used to.

Over-seen.

Ross Evertson — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 21:42:21 +0000