Paris Scratch

I spent years wandering the haunted streets of NYC & Paris both bulging with ghosts & memory, rich in phenomenological detail, encounters & coincidence & the enticing scent of decay, where the old ignites the new. This sensory wealth tends to overpower the individual residents & in order to survive you eventually end up ignoring it all. One day you wake up & wonder why you’re even living here; you must either put up or shut up; either reinvent your relation to your surroundings or get a divorce. & rather than do the easy thing—taking snapshots—I decided to record what my 5 senses registered by scribbling down a “snapshot” per day for a year while wandering, engaging in dérives—the walking & writing producing countless notepads with barely legible scribbles. Thus the Unloaded Camera Snapshots series began as an exercise to document the “snapshots” of everyday life. These eidetic, epigrammatic, not-quite prose poems, not-quite journal entries, served as meta-factual attempts to re-pollinate existence with the fecund, oft-neglected details of the everyday, la vie quotidienne.