Path of Totality

Path of Totality is a graphic and intensely intimate body of work that explores death, trauma, loss, and the greater cosmos.

Path of Totality is a graphic and intensely intimate body of work. Part meditation on his own family’s history of surviving the Holocaust, and part exploration of what it means to live in extreme uncertainty, Ben Dickey has crafted a viscerally attentive series exploring death, trauma, loss, and the greater cosmos.

Viewing the form of the image itself as a physical instrument not unlike the palimpsest, Dickey employs pre-captured photographs as tabula rasa for recombinant meanings, permutations and new discoveries. Through the interpolation of private and archival images, the work creates a speculative narrative surrounding personal and collective trauma, impermanence, and growing militarization.

Here, Ben has meticulously hand-picked archival images of miscarried wet plates and worn prints, atrophying physical relic relics of a pre-digital world. These include domestic scenes, soldiers with various facial injuries from WWII, mysterious and forgotten compositions, fractured landscapes, and even the skull-face superimposition of Nazi war criminal, Josef Mengele used for identification by the U.S. military. Ben combines these sources with photos of friends and family, his own x-rays, as well as various surfaces he has captured over the years.

By layering upwards of a dozen images per composition, he creates novel textural, temporal, and inferential terrains that feel at once cosmogenic and novel, distorting timelines while investigating what it means to suffer through precarity.

The physical and visual disintegration of each image helps to reconstitute new meaning – the image exists for ever and simultaneously for no time at all. This volatility underscores the heart of the work. Ultimately, Path of Totality is an exploration of what it feels like to live in a time of endemic suffering, genocide, war-mongering, and ecological devastation.