Does This Image Mean Anything to You? (Excerpt) (2022, 17′, Digital)

Early this summer, I visited the address of a newly posted Facebook Marketplace listing for free household goods—furniture, appliances, paintings, books, and so on. The location was a nondescript, cookie cutter apartment complex and, when I arrived, a sea of people were already meandering through aisles of valuables set up in the parking lot.

One woman, upon opening up a drawer to a vanity, found a jewelry box. She immediately snatched it, got in her car, and left the scene. Other people did the usual—picking something up, showing dissatisfaction with some minor visual feature, and then proceeding to drop it back on the ground before shuffling on to the next object to display distaste towards. Behind all the commotion, a massive dumpster loomed as a backdrop.

What had not been stated online—or a detail I had missed in my hastiness—is this was the summation of a woman’s life. A grandmother had passed away; her children and grandchildren were there, tasked to remove all her belongings from what was once her home. Many of the family members journeyed far to be there. One grandson in particular flew in from the Midwest.

I suppose they needed all the assistance they could get… the grandmother, in her later years, had become a hoarder. They still had nearly a full house of stuff to vacate as visitors continually circled the parking lot turned bazaar.

Somehow, even though the family had strictly prohibited the public from entering—and bearing witness to the mess inside, I was granted access into the home. I helped them carry out more of the woman’s items. While doing so, I told them I was an artist—a photographer. The grandson from the Midwest told me his grandmother loved photography. He led me to a pile of items inside the living room and urged me to take them. 

That day I received: two 35mm projectors, a few photobooks, a metal box of neatly sorted Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides, and—still unbelievably—a framed print of Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez.

* * *

It is now late autumn.

My recollection of the site of the apartment has faded with time. The original post has been scrubbed off of the internet. If I had been told the name of the woman who passed away—that, too, has been dissolved in my memory. 

Eroding away at me most this entire time has been the box full of slides she had taken during her life.

Other than this strange, dream-like experience, I have no meaningful attachment to these artifacts. Furthermore, it is likely no one living, besides myself, knows of the contents embedded on these slides. It would have been of no real consequence if I had not preserved them. It’s possible a local historian would benefit from sifting through these images. Yet, their scope of interest would only be a small aspect of the significance these images, perhaps, once held.

But, then again, what is meaningful is hard to conceptualize. I often wonder about my images (and more broadly my actions) once they are out of my ability to control them. Of course, this loss of controlling interpretations, meanings, and experiences does not only happen upon a person’s death; It is continually happening whenever we manifest anything into this world.

It occurs simply by acting as part of it.

On top of that, it is difficult to assess the value of our archival tendencies. It often feels like the urge to do so has become ravenous with the suite of tools at our disposal… it can be consuming at times.

Why take up 200 megabytes of hard drive space to reproduce a single slide created by someone I don’t even, and will never, know? Do they even warrant a 100 kilobyte thumbnail? Why stay up late at night to record incidental, stray radio waves—most of which are indecipherable to, and not even meant for, human ears—on an old police scanner? 

Why even combine the two together—and in this manner?

What does it mean to you?