FIELD REPORT: Dear Richmond: on Love, Pilgrimage and Redaction

October 8, 2009

Spent the day taking photographs at the – wait, no, I am forbidden to invoke the site without prior notification of, permission from, and authorization by “Richmond.”

So here goes:

Dear Richmond –

I am poised upon the precipice of incipient exploration of my own personal thoughts and reflections as they emerge within the context of a private citizen taking individually-approved photographs of unoccupied Buildings #21 and #22 – the abandoned hospitals of the former NAME REDACTED where Nazi eugenics experiments were conducted upon the epileptics of Central Virginia.

Richmond, please know that for the purposes of this artistry, discussions of these historical occurrences in no way impune, malign or implicate any contemporary occupants or activities in adjacent buildings owned and operated by the State of Virginia.  Rest assured that my knowledge of those geographical coordinates at NAME REDACTED exclusively pertains to my own experience of epilepsy hospitalizations and my historical research into the crimes committed at these coordinates under the laws of the State of Virginia.

I fully appreciate the humbling complexity of photographic ethics, Richmond, and perhaps for that exact reason – because of you henceforth quite ostentatiously – do not photograph living beings of any species within the clearly established boundaries of the State of Virginia.

Virginia is for Lovers, and I love Virginia’s garbage – pretty much all the buildings and graves that house(d) what were ostensibly human beings whom Virginia once upon a time declared to be tatamount to trash.

Yes, Richmond, rest assured that I merely photograph roadside litter on Virginia’s scenic time-space highway.

Lovingly reducing, reusing, and recycling,

Artist, Epileptic, Child of God

 

The chronology is the only simple thing about this project. So I will start there:

(1)          One day at the Old City Cemetery, I am researching the history of local midwives when I discover the existence of a thriving Nazi eugenics program at various State facilities in 1920s and 1930s Amherst County.

(2)         In reviewing the program, I discover that eugenics surgeries were conducted on local epileptics, and the address is given for the location of that hospital.

(3)         That evening, I experienced a small seizure and decided that the next day I should pay my respects to my forebearers by making a four mile pilgrimage to the hospital at which they were tortured. I googlemap the address, expecting to find an empty field.

(4)         Arrive at site of  abandoned NAME REDACTED eugenics hospital, situated on land currently being used by the State of Virginia for various health and human services enterprises

(5)         Feeling surprisingly unable to fully acknowledge the contemporary existence of these ruined buildings where my neurological brethren were tortured less than a century ago, I begin to take photographs of the sky.

(6)         For no stated purpose, I am apprehended by a uniformed and weaponed officer I believe(d) to be representative of the Virginia State Police and taken to the  NAME REDACTED office for questioning by State Officials.

(7)         In meeting with a facility representative, I am told that due to various complexities of patient privacy, I am not allowed to operate a camera on the premises without accompaniment by facility representative, and that no photographs can contain images of human beings. For that reason alone I cannot wander about with a camera. I acknowledge this as largely sensible. I am told to call back to arrange appointment and escorted off property.

(8)         I call back and arrange an appointment, spending forty-five exhausting minutes photographing the buildings escorted with a representative of the facility, who will proceed to exercise the authority to authorize and permit each photograph on an exposure-by-exposure basis.

Now this next part in the chronology is where it gets far trickier – right when I’ve had just about all the time with these buildings that I can handle in one day, and I’m satisfied that the only reason for my escort is for contemporary client privacy, and just as I’m getting a sense of closure about bearing witness to myself and my brethren and feeling a bit grateful to my source of strength for having the wherewithal to complete this pilgrimage –

right at that particular juncture is where I get hit with #9.

(9)          I am told that “Richmond” needs to know about my work with these people-less, face-less images of ruined buildings, and I will need to inform the representative of the Lynchburg NAME REDACTED facility (who will in turn notify “Richmond”) should I decide to “do anything.”

My trouble is that I feel confused and conundrumed – both bound and unbound by what we can call the Unsigned, Unwritten, Unratified Richmond Godhead Notification Authorization and Permission Treaty of October 7, 2009. Because at first, I was really on board 100% with the policy of being watched to ensure that I haven’t slipped an actual person into my photograph. But this whole dubious treaty thing is starting to rattle my bones a bit.

Let’s call it the U3-R-GNAP Un-Treaty for short.

I am resplendent on a field of discombobulation.

The Un-Treaty is a false armistice.

Indeed, its tactics worsen the wounds of war.

Let me demonstrate:

A. Since the U3-R-GNAP representative witnessed my photographs shot for shot, what permissions remain? We’re talking four cameras, with seven rolls of film, with about forty shots per roll. That makes it roughly 280 images that have been duly approved – one by one. So Richmond has no surprises there.  Through its officially appointed photographic approval escort, it has a complete inventory of every image placed on film.

B. The purported reason for all the official scrutiny is NOT because I am poking around the Nazi eugenics history of the State of Virginia. The official reason is that I might take photographs of current clients obtaining health and human services on the property. However, since every individual shot is painstakingly monitored and approved as human-free, why does the need for the U3-R-GNAP Treaty remain?

C. Is textual discussion of undeveloped and unprocessed and unprinted film whose composed shots were individually and collectively approved by a U3-R-GNAP representative covered in the U3-R-GNAP Un-Treaty? The photographs are as yet only negatives, on film, sitting in their lead lined bags on my studio worktable, waiting for the transcontinental journey, and for developing humans and their symbiotic machinery at A&I in Santa Monica to do their grisly business with the chemicals and racks and vats. Can I talk about them without permission from Richmond?

D. Since I am not taking photographs of the contemporary buildings or the contemporary clients or using the name of the contemporary facility but have only photographed the abandoned buildings in which eugenics surgeries occurred, am I to understand that if I want to talk about this history I must first inform “Richmond”?

E. Since I currently have approved negatives and no visible photographs with which to work, am I still required to gain permission from Richmond before beginning my artistic exploration of the history of Nazi eugenic experiments on Epileptics in central Virginia? Does this count as artistic exploration? I haven’t mentioned the name of the facility yet.

F. Who or what in the hell is this “Richmond” so cavalierly invoked by the U3-R-GNAP Un-Treaty of October 8, 2009?

I began by writing that I am poised upon the precipice of incipient exploration.

But I feel somewhat hampered by that – with the invocation of Richmond, and the insistent gaze of the appointed interlocutor…it’s highly unnerving. And for an epileptic, that’s dangerous, right?

Let us set aside concerns about the Treaty that dare not speak its name.

Let us sally forth.

I cannot currently restrain myself from plunging forward and stating that this respectful, understandable, and fully reasonable procedure of having my individual shots monitored and approved of currently stands as the most unpleasant artistic experience of my entire artistic career to date.

The Russians I encountered, faithfully guarding their Nazi SS cemetery, have nothing on “Richmond” – nay, the gentile steeliness of Richmond far eclipses the tiny Soviet-era geriatric babushkas and alarmingly muscle-bound men who loitered with a scrutiny far beyond that typical of their gender whenever my cameras emerged.  The grandmothers who pummeled me in the arms and chest, who screamed at me and backed me into walls and down staircases and opened up the vortexes of the gateways to hell have nothing on Richmond.

I didn’t arrive saying, I have epilepsy, and the crimes against humanity committed in these buildings really bothers me.

I just arrived to photograph the sky, and the weapons-laden state officials who apprehended me were now escorting me around the foundations of the buidlings in which people just like me – exactly like me – were brutally experimented on and butchered within my lifetime.

So it was profoundly complicated to walk around two abandoned buildings – where no people have been for decades – with a representative of the State of Virginia approving every single photograph of every blade of grass, every broken window, every shattered stair, every mildewed board, every crumbling brick.

I write this ON A BLOG, so yes, it’s absurd to complain about scrutiny. But on a blog, the people who are actually still reading at this point are engaging on my rules – I have chosen freely to make certain materials publically available, and the readership has chosen freely to participate.

Whereas to be watched in the field, to know that nothing I can create can be created without the approval of a government representative?

Unprecedented.

It also brings up a curious aspect of the artistic process, whereby I am not a journalist. I am reporting my experience as an artist, which is shamanistic at best, and lunatic at worst, and either way deeply human.

To give an example – the first time I went to the administrative buildings, escorted by the man-with-gun, I recall the office being full of very large WPA-era murals of white-coated doctors and nurses staring down upon me– when I returned yesterday, I saw very large WPA-era paintings of happy children playing in meadows.

Presumably, they did not use the intervening two weeks to commission fake WPA murals of happy children, while the ominous spectres of oversize Nazi denizens languished in a moldy cellar. So yes, art is laden with the warped and shifting lens of human perspective. And I’m fine with that. We just need lots of lenses, is all.

Regardless of my own personal neuroticism of being so closely monitored – justified or phantasmagoric matters not – my artistic process is really bizarre looking and next time I would like to hire a posse of stripper clowns to distract the Interlocutor should this ever happen again.  People see cameras and expect predictable cameratic operations to ensue. Instead, what I do with my dubious and battered apparatus makes no rational sense at all. (And I have found that some people become curious when they are surprised, and others become belligerent. I like the curious people.) People sometimes get angry at how I photograph the dirt, or the sky.

In this case, no comment was made about the tactics I was using.  There was no comment about anything except the Un-Treaty.

Personally, I have no problem following the ostensible SITE REDACTED rules of engagement – don’t photograph people –but really all politics and philosophy aside, it’s downright agonizing to be scrutinized in the field because the actual rules of engagement are:

dammit can we put this behind us who the hell do you think you are really this is unpleasant and uncomfortable and doesn’t the fact that we keep people with guns around give you some indication that we don’t want trouble of any kind horrific things happened here while many of us were perhaps still employed and lots of us care very deeply for the well-being of what happens here and this is shameful at best and you know we’re just going to make your life difficult as hell if you want to go through any personal or political or spiritual or ethical or any other kind of process here we just really don’t wish you any kind of success for the love of god get me a drink.

Despite everything, I successfully underwent a complex official witness of my own mute and mulish internal process of bearing witness, making pilgrimage, constructing memorials of light.

One epileptic, standing ground, circa 2009.

So where does Richmond want to come in to approve my photographs of broken old bricks?

Why?

Why not just put a sign up or some official acknowledgement that says crummy things happened here in the shadows of the past and thank god today civil rights protections ensure the well-being of disabled Americans.

I mean, it would be in many ways a lie, but it would a differently ingenuous lie, and would at least constitute a different effort.

Because the more you try to cover something up, the more it starts to smell.  As it is, they have to expend a lot of money for guns and ammunitions, and their officials have to pace the lawn with gloomy artistique types dispersing the fermented stench of bottled up old crimes. They could have just pointed me to a little brown roadside marker and left me alone in my musings, like they do for Jubal Early’s house.

Instead, I am expected to clear any artistic thoughts with Richmond prior to their release into the public domain.

What if my photographs are completely abstract and nonrepresentational – are they still held accountable to Richmond as portraits of abandoned eugenics hospitals at REDACTED SITE?

What if I never went to the REDACTED SITE at all?

What if I instead took a photograph of the blue sky above my studio in Southern California, and titled it PORTRAIT OF ABANDONED EUGENICS HOSPITAL AT REDACTED SITE, and hung it on a wall in a Los Angeles gallery?

Dear Richmond: Fuck You.