Good Bones

"Good Bones" is a project that is trying to make sense of a moment in time. Both a moment in an individuals life, as well as trying to navigate a tumultuous epoch. The work is intended to be a critique of modernity while seeking an optimistic mo

One of my kids is barricaded in her room, sick with Covid for the first time. She made it through these first four years without seeing a double line, so her illness is mercifully mild to almost non-existent. The sound of whatever horrible Netflix show is blaring over the baby monitor I left in there so she can call me without spreading germs throughout the house. The other daughter has developed acute anxiety; mostly a fear around being sick, but also about the world outside our house. She asks me to feel her forehead multiple times a day, and wont let me listen to NPR in the car. She internalizes the news and it aggravates these feelings too much. My wife continues to suggest that we move to another country. Sometimes she’s being serious. I’m just not sure that would be any better, but I understand why she thinks so. I find myself thinking to the past, even thinking I was born in the wrong generation. I know that I’m looking through a rose-colored lens, but it’s hard not to when the past few years have been so rocky. It’s all anyone can think about; it’s the first thing we bring up when making small talk, but the world has always run into these types of sand traps and we still continue to slouch forward.

These impressionistic thoughts have guided the picture making here, but it’s been hard to formulate in the written word. It is not meant to be a document of a time, but rather a thought in the abstract. using pictures as equivalents for the dizzying news cycles. Thinking about how, as time passes, it tends to repeat itself. These pictures are an attempt to try to make sense of the world that I will leave for my children…or at least appreciate that it may never become clear.

I’ve been researching poems and books and photographs trying to help me grasp what has been grabbing hold of me and I landed on this line from Gary Winogrand’s 1964 Guggenheim application:

I look at the pictures I have done up to now, and they make

me feel that who we are and how we feel and what is to become

of us just doesn’t matter. Our aspirations and successes have

been cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists,

some books, I look at a lot of magazines (our press). They all

deal in illusions and fantasies. I can only conclude that we have

lost ourselves, and that the bomb just might finish the job

permanently, and it just doesn’t matter, we have not loved life

I cannot accept my conclusions so I must continue this

photographic investigation further and deeper. This is my project.

In 1964, Winogrand was only a few years younger than I am now (Although past what would be the middle of his too short life). The world, and this country were in a tentative place: Having adapted to a postwar abundance and preparing for the unrest of entering another. These parallels are not lost on me as I come into my own middle age, living in a world that refuses to be tethered to any rational or familiar way of understanding. I suppose this is a self-portrait of sorts. Looking forward to what kind of future will be the legacy of this confusing present. Clearly, I am not the first to look outside and feel this, and I am sure I won’t be the last. But even as this disquiet lingers I do not believe we are all-together ineffective. This work is an effort to gain an acceptance of things that may or may not be inevitable. Staring back, perhaps there can be a better awareness of our moments of joy, and with that insight, perhaps a building-upon to fix some of the rot has invaded our home as we look to regain control over a future that will always be undefined.