There are two books I have titled, Devotion(s). First, Devotions by Mary Oliver, a large book of selected poems.
Read it daily.
Read it randomly.
Leave it around and pick it up on whim.
Oliver uses nature as a springboard to the sacred—the beating heart of her work.
-Ruth Franklin
Second, Devotion by Patti Smith, a slim booklet out through the Wyndham Campbell Prizes, a series of lectures on Why I Write.
“Drawn to yet an older headstone, I note the word DEVOUEMENT carved diagonally on the border. I ask Alain what it means. –Devotion, he answers, smiling.”
I picked up Devotion at Rizzoli Books, when on I was on a work trip to NYC. I was doing the usually Spring photography things: AiPAD, Frieze, galleries, museums, and ICP Photo Book Festival. Absorbing the strange sensation of being back in it while noting what is on view. Classics, bold contemporary mixed-media pieces, large haunting things.
After maybe 15 years, I was able to see again Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, which felt incredibly of the moment. A triangular room lined with black panels, soft lighting, awaiting the guests and us for the event. It was eery and mesmerizing to walk to each place setting and imagine the discourse…though, more than imaging it, we are living it.
“It was ahead of culture’s ability to accept female-centered imagery. There was no language for it, no critical framework for it, no art-historical framework for it”.- Judy Chicago, Bomb Magazine interview with Olivia Gauthier, March 2018
At the ICP Photo Book Festival, I visited the Mack Book table and fell in love with this new title from the vivid and tender photographer, Ahndraya Parlato titled, Who is Changed and Who is Dead. Lusciously printed photographs on mat paper (I’m a sucker for the depth of mat paper!), interspersed with glossy photograms, and diaristic writing. The book is a complicated telling of death, loss, trauma, parenthood, and fear of hope. Ahndraya’s photographs feel like contemplations within the day-to-day on the heaviness of being.
Stringing together these consumptive themes, the telling of the world through a singular lens of experience. Noticing. Noting. Taking In. Retelling through the tools we have access to: the lens, the thread, the pen. A range of perception and devotion to the showing up…over and over and over. It’s not easy, we know, but the constant being within the act of our story as the only voice necessary and capable.
In this shaping through these artists over the last week, I’ve begun to understand this space as shaping a container of the Instax film archive. The buzzing that pushes me to tend to this space as a log of retelling.
Perhaps this is all a radical experiment to see if Substack can be a platform for a Photo-book-in-weekly-doses. I guess we’ll see.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Moment Making List:
The sky
Flash fiction by the incredible Scott Daughtridge DeMer, The Lamp
Make photos, make care.
Stephanie