A Way into Water
2026
It’s a sick-strange place west of the river; the landscape is full of symptoms. The world unfurls in pale nests of water and fog, and strikes of furious color occasionally batter the eye. Looking is
so very much like a fever here: we see a landscape of no particular dogma, oscillating between neutral prognosis (today, clouds) and elemental terror (now, fire). We slip between and into signals, and in our rotten imagination, want to make something of it (so conditioned for end-times,
are we). But very much like a fever, with its ebbs and flows, the only thing to do is surrender;
bide your time; enjoy your symptom. In Badach’s planetary and imaginal world, the landscape
has never been a threat—it just is. And rather than make a terror or a pleasure out of it, inhabitants seem to let it be simply so. The feeling, perhaps, is this: dirt is not swept from the kitchen floor (the earth a mere by-product of experience tracked into the home), but a body
is swept round a river bend like light and insignificant dust. In this landscape, the body is merely
a word in a very long song.
This effect is achieved through a childlike reordering of the senses, the recovery of an original way of sight, when one would use their young eyes very completely to follow the path of something
or other, until it was just a color, and until it was even less than that; the fruitful pleasure
in looking for no reward, fixed to a quizzical and natural world. The earth has always spoken
a language that could be interpreted through sight, and the camera invents a grammar for it, arrived at by the sum of the photographer’s experiences in a particular environment. In looking at these images, I feel a sight sensitized by the very liveness of things, and an environment made supple and imaginative all the more for it. A photograph is nothing but the pit of someone’s heart, and how marvelous to find a blue forest and starlight inside; a hole in a river; a way into water.
The Field
2025
Where to begin?
The beginning is surely too far away. It takes place in different worlds, under separate skies
and sundry weather. The middle is elusive, entirely dependent on the end. And seeing how
the end is always least expected, there is nowhere to begin but some place in between.
The between place is a field. The field is not heaven or hell; it is just as awful and regular as any weekday. But there is an abnormal quantity of light, and pictures are encouraged. They are understood as an expression of need. We heard about this between place, and thought it sounded nice. We thought we ought to find it. We arrived one by one, and the field grew to accommodate
all our looking. It became a field of vision. Where one looked, another looked, too, and in these patches of shared sight, the field was made supple and infinite. With a camera in our hand,
we find ourselves unable to stop.
It’s not that we have to stay here. It’s not that one less picture means the tomb. But to leave
the field is to concede desire itself; it is far better to stay than to stop wanting. The world seems
to understand this. By some good will, its days and details regenerate, sharing in our medium
of endurance. Again, the photographer approaches their subject: I love you. Thank you. I’m sorry. Can I see what it looks like if you—?
This is a tender appeal, and it surely wears over time. It may appear formless, a collection
of apologetic tones, selected for some reason long ago when the photographer began to perceive the consequences of their wanting. To want is an exquisite and heavy thing, but to want through images is an even more sensitive ballast. The very reason for it all can thin in the sustained exertion of making, of making until time stops. We’ve heard of this threat of artistic entropy
in Macbeth’s soliloquy, Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. In its third repetition, ‘tomorrow’ collapses into total abstraction, existing as nothing but sound. How terrifying. How beautiful. Quick, the camera.
On the periphery of the field, there is a small and secreted hope for a quaint conclusion:
the purchase of a home, the growing of a garden, the last debt paid. These are common
dreams of resolution, of the edge. But as we have learned, the field is a variation on infinity.
At its perceived rim, another expanse unfolds. How beautiful. How terrifying. Hurry, before
the light fades.
Us ten photographers, at the end of our second year, at the cusp of the third thing. Are we
at risk of formlessness? Of a pale and furious future? No, I do not think so. Even in its collapse, ‘tomorrow’ is conserved as sound; sound is a unit of time; time is a current in the infinite field.
If anything—if anything at all—we are at the edge of the possibility space.
My friends, good things come in threes.
First Breath
Second Sight
Third Beginning