My life has felt like impression of a dream; it’s as if I belong in another world. Sometimes I question my own reality. As a child I learned to escape the world that surround me. My isolation began early. I keep trying to find meaning in all that and identify the root cause of this discontent. There is a part of my life that is still a wounded child that cries out in the darkness. My universe became a world of escapism and this is where I still tend to dwell. As a child I read a lot; I was caught in the plight of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and my heart had a dire kinship with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Was I destined to lead a life of doomed tragic heroine? There was something poetic about it. As I got older I fell in love with paintings; they offered a brightly colored world that I could visit and lose myself within. I was drawn to the brightly muted colors of the Italian Renaissance and the soft impressionisms of Monet’s gardens. Then in high school when I went to work as a projectionist at the local cinema, my passions shifted to the escapism of movies. For the longest part of my life I felt like I didn’t really belong any particular place and my life became a constant drift. I chose theater because it was the life of a vagabond drifter. Never having to be in any particular place for to long a period of time, I was again drawn to the darkness behind the scenes. The world of theater supported my escapist mentality. Where else can you constantly create an alternate universe and get paid for it? In college I was particularly drawn to the plays of Tennessee Williams; more tragic heroines. My heart still goes out to Alma in Summer & Smoke and that final scene where the puritan woman has fallen from her high moral grace and picks up the stranger, the traveling salesman, to fulfill her longed for carnal desire. I am not sure I was always gay; so many people say they knew they were gay from the beginning. With me I was never quite sure. I have felt a desire for both sexes and enjoyed being with both equally as well. I guess this ambivalence leads more to my loneliness, because I feel like I don’t really belong either way. I have not known a normal life. I have not done normal things. Somehow since childhood I have known I was not destined to become a normal kid. People always mistook this as a sort of arrogance and I was isolated because of it. Through the years, as I have gotten older and though I am not alone, I still feel the isolation and exile within myself. I have great difficulty in communication with others and have found comfort in that darkness. I think this is why I was always destined to become a photographer. A photographer can live and create his own reality and see the world as he wants. I am drawn to the loneliness in others and so these are the objects of my images. They are stories of lost connections, emptiness, and lonely lives lived. The most common thing I hear is that my images have a haunting beauty in them. Perhaps it’s like a car wreck and we just want to see in the lives of others. My images are not an exploration of the beautiful, but the beauty in the ordinary. To elevate the average to a level of extraordinary breadth. To live as an impression of the shadow of ones dream, desire and tragedy.
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Travis Red Cloth #101
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