everything will be forgotten (self-portrait as child, no. 2.2)
Frank Rodick, 2014
everything will be forgotten / season of mists
statement
Frank Rodick, 2015
Maybe the best way for me talk about this work is to say something about pictures I did earlier. Shortly after my mother died in 2010, I found a set of old photographs in worn albums my father kept over decades — small passport sized portraits of my mother as a young woman. Using these photographs as the foundation, I constructed a set of images I thought might say something about her life, and her death too, both of which were difficult. These became the Frances pictures.
What happened — so obvious and inevitable I feel ridiculous saying it — was that these images said as much about me as they did about her, almost certainly a lot more. I settled on seeing my Frances pictures (completed between 2011 and 2014) as a shared visual memoir — of my mother, of me, of us, as I said elsewhere, "stitched together in that sad and harrowing way we never stopped being."
Till then I’d never made what I'd call a self-portrait. Maybe the pictures of my mother nudged me along. Maybe it was the shadow of that last parent’s death — the seminal event announcing that you’re next, clichéd but true. My mother's death underscored different things for me: mortality, sure, but more. A peculiar kind of loneliness. Freedom. And an eerie sort of hope that came with an unfamiliar sense of clarity that I didn't know whether to trust or not.
———
I'd had years of practice to get my my mind in the habit of roaming across time. So I went back to the old albums, those heavy forest green binders with black pages. I found more aged pictures, including small beaten up black-and-white snapshots of me as a child.
In those photos, I'm standing naked in a bathtub. My father is behind the camera. His handwriting’s on the back of the prints.
everything will be forgotten (self-portrait as child, no. 1.2)
Frank Rodick, 2014
Looking at those photographs of that three-year boy standing naked in a bath, got me roaming. Into psychic territories, the ones littered under the condensed mists of time and memory. I tried to remember what happened in those early days — jagged things that happen in the secret lives of families. Those things, those events, resurfaced as occasional bursts of fire, but mostly as things that just, well, happened … first over seconds, then minutes. Then years. But what seems more important, especially now, is that they, those things, never left. They stayed… deep and long shadows, unremitting whispers, occasional but almost always silent cries from voices I can now barely tell apart.
Looking at those early photographs carried me to a place that maybe should have felt intolerable but, like almost all such places, did not. Not then, and not now. I knew then that that I could use these small photos of a boy in a bath. I knew I could transform these old pictures into something that would use a boy’s pale thin body — my body — to give voice to some manifestation of secrets, eruptions of emotion and intemperance, those violent shadows and longings.
From that process came the images I now call everything will be forgotten. And those images in turn led to more contemplation, this time on the man I’d become. The images from everything will be forgotten startled me with their violence. But they also reminded me — like a crisp blow to the face— that no matter how I’d changed, certain things do not. They reminded me that to be human is to bear the fears and havoc, large and small, of long ago. That being human is to be a dark and corporeal storehouse of a murmuring remembrance. That, until the end, the boy holds his ground inside the man.
From that emerged more images – self-portraits of myself, collectively titled season of mists, from the poem by Keats. They show me as I am now, a man with far more years behind him than in front. They show me living in the present, but, like us all, shouldering the past. And waiting for what unfailingly comes next, just as autumn waits for winter.
self-portrait (season of mists, no. 1)
Frank Rodick, 2015