photo by Mel Bochner

“We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

- Margaret Atwood

I’d like to make the kind of pictures that live in the gaps between stories, or even the gap between what is considered “Photography.”  I think that is where things might be most interesting, somewhere in blank middle grey spaces, at the edges of whatever it is photographers are trying to do today.

“I hadn’t understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only the words ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ still had any meaning for me.”

- Albert Camus, The Stranger

“In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever ‘in and of itself.’”

- Chuck Klosterman

“In dread we are ‘in suspense.’ Or, to put it more precisely, dread holds us in suspense because it makes what-is-in-totality slip away from us. Hence we too, as existents in the midst of what-is, slip away from ourselves along with it. For this reason it is not ‘you’ or ‘I’ that has the uncanny feeling, but ‘one.’”

- Martin Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (trans. R. F. C. Hull & A. Clark) in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (ed. W. Kaufman), 2004, Plume, 249

Commonly defined as a loss of hope, Despair in existentialism is more specifically related to the reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the “pillars” of one’s self or identity. If one is invested in being a particular thing, a waiter or an “upstanding citizen,” for example, and one finds oneself in a situation in which one has done something or had something happen to oneself that compromises this being-thing, one would normally find oneself in a state of despair, a hopeless state. An athlete who loses his legs in an accident may despair if he has nothing to “fall back on,” for instance. One is confronted with the irreality of what one had taken to be one’s self.

What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the dictionary definition is that existentialist despair is a state one is in even when one isn’t overtly in despair: As long as one has based one’s identity on such pillars so that one is vulnerable to having one’s world break down, one is considered to be in perpetual despair. And as, in Sartrean terms, there is no human essence based in reality from which to constitute one’s sense of identity, despair is a truly human condition. As Kierkegaard defines it in his Either/or: “Any life-view with a condition outside it is despair.” In other words, it is possible to be in despair without despairing.