2019 · The First Cost
Building Cinematic Worlds
In 2019, absence became permanent. TheIssa’s grandmother died, and with her went his last living grandparent. The losses of the previous year had changed who belonged in his life; this loss changed his sense of where he stood in his family’s history.
There was no longer a grandparent to ask for another story or another piece of the past. An entire generation now had to be reached through memory. He was still a son and a grandson, but carrying that history forward was becoming his responsibility too. The future he was pursuing could not keep everyone waiting unchanged until he was ready to return.
The year’s dense photo archive gives that concern a visual form. Looking, framing, and documenting became ways to hold a moment before it passed. Images began to belong to scenes, and scenes to a larger emotional world. The music followed the same instinct: a song could be a room, an entrance, a confrontation, or a memorial.
Until then, so much of the image-making had faced forward, toward the person he might become. Grief turned part of it back toward what he could still preserve. Finishing remained difficult, and much of the world stayed behind the curtain, but completion now meant more than gaining recognition. It could keep something of a loved person from disappearing with the moment.