“And what people I met…almost every day: fragments of caryatids on whom

the whole pain lay…”

This work began in 1993 and ended some three years later. In the past, I wrote much about it, my interests, and the allure of the rugged paths of Père LaChaise.

Mountainous, rugged,

eternity is a steep climb

and falling is always, here,

a risk.

A refuge and release

from the streets,

from long feminine fingers

flicking ashes from cigarettes

I worked slowly, and

was forgiven my long stare.

Expansive, palatial, these lives-

they have raised up

the frail and fearful.

A repository or marble,

which closed, absurdly,

at the end of each day.

Now, everything is reduced to almost nothing. Words about pictures fail. I once walked through cemeteries simultaneously haunted and fascinated by decay. Nothing endures.

The things photographed exist and serve as a negation to my human hope for order.

“…to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us.” Camus (Sisyphus).

The experiential aspects of picture-making constitute the only reality I ever owned. Burdened by intellectual refuse, I spent years in efforts to resolve thought into images, but with nothing of any power to show for it.

“There is, it seems to us,

At best, only a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.

The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies.”

--T.S. Eliot

I was like those described by the critic John Berger:

“Everyday people came to visit them and listen to their silence.”

Todd Houston

Todd Houston