Out on the pier the chairs stand empty — a set of lakelifecore, wood-slatted furniture turned towards a sunset sky blasted in saffron, pumpkin, rose petal, and the deep bruise of ube candy.
The empty seats recall the ghosts and phantoms of vacations past, each chair occupied by a different memory created with family and friends: in the summer on a pontoon boat, before sunrise deep in a shore-side blind watching for duck, or on a paddleboard cutting the glass surface of a cove.
The silhouettes of trees in the foreground, with their negative space and skeletal limbs, accentuate the effect of absent presence. They echo the viewers, who look on the scene and fill it with their own thoughts and reminiscences, their own significance.
After the holidays, these moments disappear from daily thoughts, residing somewhere in the mind’s topography, waiting to be remembered. And then the photos come back as a touchstone — the audience’s own image in a photo roll on the phone, a sudden horizon in a daydream, or the photo shown by a friend.
This sunset shore’s burst of color might remind the viewer that we stockpile experiences and relationships, but do we bring them back to the present to reinvoke the value and significance in new ways, weaving them into our waking moments as we go to work, class, or back to our rooms to forge what our futures might bring?
The things of our past, including this photo of a vacation just taken, can be more than fleeting digital files in a device, or momentary posts in a social media account. They can be selected talismans in which we invest and reinvest the meanings of our present, in which we bring the rich textures and interactions of what was experienced before into values of the daily life we live.
These talismans can help slow down the velocity of minutes and hours and days, resist the world that rushes into the electronic nether of attentions sucked away by notifications, emails, and endless discoveries of strangers’ lives on the feed. For what lies in the distance that the ghosts and skeletons in this photo watch so intently? A far shore, already darkened by night, amongst whose forests the nocturnal animals already begin to stir, foraging, hunting, waiting and watching for us.