Introduction
“Hypnogogic Verses” is an interlocking sequence of 56 black and white, and color photographs. The images bear witness to the process of dying, where it begins and if it ends. I set out to investigate the boundaries of death as event and as idea, through the memory of my mother,through my attendance at animal slaughters, my observation of changing landscapes, and-- most importantly-- through interactions with my grandfather, Goong, the primary subject of this project.
The people and subjects in the photographs are rooted in reality: my aging grandfather as he is now and as he was as a young man; my mother (in a photograph taken by my father); pigs slaughtered on a farm in Maine and in the backyard of a Puerto Rican family’s house in Belchertown, MA; bison on a farm and at a slaughterhouse in Connecticut; commercially farmed blueberry barrens in autumn; a shark that washed up on a Florida beach; the remnants of a chicken that was gutted at my feet in a small town in China; an expired blue jay on a dirt road; a lonely birch in February, a palm tree at the edge of a gorge in southwestern China, a tree behind the wall of a building site in Beijing; the yellow sheets in Goong’s bedroom . All of these images, one by one…..
The sequence of these images, like stanzas in poem, is intended to be read as a visual text, as a poem, rooted in personal truth and confession but open ended enough for another’s interpretation. The photographs are meant to be read in order; there is a beginning and an end.