Noah
03/19/2005 - Center Point, PA
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ROADKILL
MANIFESTO: Just Because It's In Slow Motion
Doesn't Mean You Can Stop It - (Over a decade of documenting
roadkill with various cameras)
2009 Update:
My obsession with taking pictures of roadkill is complicated and complex. It is a ritualistic form of ancestor worship and spiritual connection to the natural world. It is also a critical dissection of our/my place in it, and an apology for our/my disruptive unnatural influence.
More recently, I have begun to not only photograph my subjects, but also have acquired certain mantras to help them pass from this realm to the next. For these I am eternally grateful. Hovering over these precious vessels, trying to shine a light in the dark, I am now able to acknowledge that I have slowly been transforming my camera into a shamanic tool all these years. This further prods all the questions I've ever had about the separation and integration of art, life cycles, and spirituality from one another.
A lot of people don't understand my art. They think I'm trying to shock people, or that I'm romanticizing death or dark ideals. None of these is the case.
All of life is a delicate balance, with life itself balanced by death. As a society, we mistakenly fear death because we cannot control it. We have lost the understanding that total, self-imposed control upsets the balance of life and is unnatural. Therefore, we perceive death as a threat, or a dark force.
Many artists create imagery of their ideal lives, perfect beautiful moments, and most pleasing aesthetics. This has its place, and serves many purposes, none the least to sometimes balance our lives and bring us joy when we are sad, etc. But we do understand from experience that desiring for things to ALWAYS be easy, happy and controllable is unrealistic. This expectation has become somewhat of a silent agreement in society that makes us manic, mentally unstable, sick and depressed. It turns us into control freaks to the point that we ignore our own ethics and the balance required of life.
As an example, we desire so much to not only have things like easy transport, but also that these modes must be aesthetically pleasing (materialism), easy to use (we are disconnected from its source/production cycle/workings), and affordable (wasteful of unrenewable resources, disregard for true cost of labor, etc.). These demands are unbalanced and destructive, but their nature has been aesthetically transformed by agreeing to focus solely on their pleasurable, attractive attributes as if only they existed.
"The closer you move to the light,
the larger your shadow becomes."
This quote perfectly sums up the imbalance I am attempting to focus on in my art.
I have chosen to concentrate on a facet of reality that is often unobserved and/or unacknowledged, because in actuality, we might consider Balance to be the force behind all healing. I think that when we heal ourselves by re-balancing our perspective and actions, we will also be able to extend that healing beyond us out into the world in which we live.
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