Photographed under the spell of Ghosts Along The Mississippi by Clarence John Laughlin, I worked from the inside out in creating this book of pictures. That means I started in the middle of doing something about which I knew nothing. Essentially I learned by doing rather than flogging formal study of a craft, and then applying expertise from the outside to what was stirring around within. Actually that is my mission - to stir up the dark waters of the unconscious. In order to achieve a peripatetic looseness, I found a 35mm Schneider/Kreuznach lens that I had seen lavished so brilliantly upon subjects captured by Henri-Cartier Bresson and by William Eggleston. The small parallax camera permitted the required agility of movement, yet sacrificed lushness of tones rendered by the encumbered pictorialist camera of Laughlin.
To descend into the Orphic vision I created a persona - as I have done with all that I do, whether in song, in print, or on film. It is one song that I sing over and over. To connect that persona with the surface of the images captured here, I connected persona with icons. Whether overtly or discreetly evoked, these iconic images resonate with the undercurrent of sentiment, of betrayal, of lost causes in which my pictures are soaked. In my hands the camera is hardly an objective instrument.
No body cares what the camera sees. All people really want to see is what the secret eye of the persona sees. Objective photography is like music without soul. Music is a harmonic/disharmonic abstraction of emotion. The icons scattered by the roadside in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee are more than indexed/nuanced signs and meanings, they are infused with emotion and as such are living, breathing images. America is a sad country. My pictures are sad. Often forlorn, amusement or a clement epiphany has just evaded the film frame an instant before the shutter was released. The pictures are perhaps more about what I do not aim my camera at. I am looking at you, but I do not see you because I see more than I want to see. I photograph what is not there. The captions I have written for each photograph are not an evasion, nor an explanation, nor an apology. The captions are an intertext drawn from the purview of my persona. Still you can create your own captions, because once you turn the page and behold an image, it is no longer mine. - Tav Falco 2015 Paris