"It's just one little part of the world, but things take place there too, just like everywhere else."
Clip from Smoke, 1995.
2025, 10.667" x 11, Photo collage (Digital and film photographs, VHS & DVD captures)
For PHAC's You Had To Be There (instructions)
When I was a teenager I signed up for Columbia House’s 8 CDs for 1¢ deal, and for one of my selections I took a chance on the soundtrack for a movie I’d never heard of much less seen called Blue In The Face. The soundtrack was a lot of fun but I was even more intrigued by what I learned about the movie. The internet was something you didn’t encounter much outside of a library back then, so I must’ve read in a magazine somewhere that it was actually a companion piece to a totally different movie called Smoke about a cigar shop in Brooklyn. While Smoke was scripted like most movies, Blue In The Face was something very different. Super famous people like Lou Reed, Madonna, Michael J. Fox, RuPaul, Lily Tomlin, and many more were invited to the set with no game plan and improvised sketches with the cast, led by Harvey Keitel. These improvisations were then strung together with voiceover by Keitel into a movie. The idea that all of these people with surely much better things to do would take time out of their busy schedules in the spirit of creativity and collaboration to make who knows what was a totally foreign but intriguing concept to me. I would’ve loved to see it but I was in a small town long before streaming and my only way to see movies was a video store that only stocked a dozen or so blockbusters, so that’s where the story ended.
About 20 years later, I was living in Brooklyn, and remembered these two movies that were some of my first tenuous connections to my new home. I found out that I lived only about a mile and a half from the shop where both movies were filmed, so I photographed the corner in present day and decided to turn the photos into some kind of a memorial to this otherwise ordinary corner that you’d never guess hosted some of the biggest stars of the 90’s a few decades ago. When I finally watched both films, I was astonished that the main character does exactly what I planned to do: photograph the same corner over and over again, attempting to document a single place on Earth and all that has happened there. What you see before you doesn’t feel much different from any other corner in Brooklyn, but in the hot summer of 1994, Madonna and RuPaul danced here, Michael J. Fox made people laugh here, John Lurie played music here, Lou Reed complained here.
Later, I found out that the cigar shop never existed (though half of the space is now a vape shop, the modern day equivalent); it was a set constructed in a vacant storefront that had previously been a laundromat and a post office. The movie was partially an adaptation of a piece of short fiction presented at the time as fact by screenwriter/co-director Paul Auster, in which the protagonist tells Auster what he claims is a true story, though Auster knows it’s a fabrication. There’s no denying though that there’s something that at least *feels* real in the material, both written and filmed, that plays with the idea of emotional truth, embellished as it may be. With all of that in mind, I constructed this image from dozens of sources dating as far back as 85 years, from film and digital, from DVDs and VHS tapes, from reality and fiction, pieced together like stories often are.