About Poetry of Actions and Things

THE EVIDENCE OF UNSEEN DRAMA ALL AROUND

There is a poetry in action, in movement, in the relationship of things.  We dance to that music, flirting with a world we do not see.  Horror and beauty bound into the same object at the same time.  Our eyes are glazed.  We look away towards our destinations.

The pictures around us are provided titles, signs, punch-lines without laugh-tracks.  God is mischievous and ironic and all about.

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The photos on this site are a part of my low-res life:  They are taken with camera phones, for the most part.  Or with whatever inexpensive. low-res digital camera I could put in my pocket during this time.  I wished I had a better camera, but I don’t.  And it would have to fit in my pocket.

The beauty is that the camera is always there for that moment or place or movement or face.  The fear is that the eye, the frame, the subject, the meaning might not rise to a height which makes a low-res life something you want to really SEE.  I mean, you walked past it before, right?

And what of my own little low-res life, this hanging onto a cliff with the tiger above and the alligator below?  Is it this heightened sense of reality which makes these little cliff flowers so fragrant to me?  What if all of this is really nothing after all?  What then of my obsession with the illegal scribblings on the wall, these signs of passage, these whisperings of the blessed unimportant, poets and vandals?

Who takes the time to plan a painting on an abandoned wall and executes it under cover of dark, knowing that in a year, or a month, or a week, or a day, or even an hour later, it will be gone with perhaps no one ever seeing it?

I started doing this version of collecting signs, graffiti, things and people in the Lower East Side about 5 years ago with a palm pilot camera and cannot stop.  I have thousands of photos, some useless, some magnificent– to me.

So much of what was permanent is gone.  So much of what was temporary remains.

Who knows, but maybe a low-res life is just as important as whatever else we imagine there is just around the corner…

Anthony Riddle/Ras No One