Elks Lodges

These photographs are made in collaboration with Rachel Gargiulo and are part an extended project to create a dynamic archive of the contemporary BPOE (Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks) lodges. The overall approach will be interview based, emphasizing personal dialogues.

The Elks had modest beginnings in 1868 as a private club for entertainers whose members were known as "The Jolly Corks". It was established to elude New York City municipal laws governing the opening hours of public taverns, particularly on Sundays. The Elks have since evolved into a major fraternal, charitable organization with over a million members, both men and women, throughout North America.

During the height of the welfare state, the Elks saw their golden age, where membership in service organizations offered ritualized fraternity through demonstrative acts of morality, allegiance, and civic benevolence. Though, with younger generations seeking a very different kind of leisure, the Elks have steadily suffered a decrease in numbers. Its membership literally dies out without replacement.

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The desire to create a record of the present-day Elks communities grew from our shared experiences of visiting lodges encountered during a cross-country road trip. As unexpected strangers, we were continually welcomed with fanfare and acclaim, since our combined age was less than the average age of the typical Elks member. What was initially perplexing became polarized by acute sensations of familiarity and disconnect, echoing impressions of home and belonging.

The initial structure of our project will be photographically centered, emphasizing personal dialogues. This project will be collaborative, allowing for singular Elks communities to participate in their collective history. The archive will democratize images and history, extending to the archive itself though local lodge collaboration.

 

 

This is (Still) the Golden Age

What the hell is all this crap about color theory? The only part of the electromagnetic spectrum worth talking about is the TV bandwidth." - Ollie Pavelle

As one of the first photographic methods, the photogram was empirically valued for its ability to trace an object by direct contact. To view a photogram is to witness the recent absence of an object that had touched the paper. The need to experience that moment of contact outweighed the shortcoming of its description.

Television programs are broadcast and lost. The signals can be transduced into another form. They are replayed from a recording, though the presence of the initial broadcast is lost when replayed. Pressing the photographic paper against the tube, heat and light emanating from the television are relayed. Producing its own light, the television image is self-inscribed, fulfilling the desire to span distances, making illusions more present.

 

 

Countrypolitan

If farming were considered a disease, the place I am from would be considered recovering from it. On a map, the space is squares; as a place, the air is cold in the winter. This makes it hard to breathe, though it is harder to find something that makes you want to keep breathing.

After migrating to the city, I became painfully aware of how provincial my perceptions had been. The insult to injury was that the new individuals I had encountered seemed to know that about me ahead of time. Someone told me that Midwesterners carry this belief that the greatest destination always exists somewhere else, even if they are already there. My suitcases are not near large enough to cover that kind of wardrobe requirement.

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These photographs negotiate a paradox of desiring to appear as folkish and cosmopolitan. Romanticizing both the country and the city, I encounter an intersection of class and culture through objects I own within familiar surroundings. Attempting to glamorize this lifestyle to myself, I become caught in the middle of what I remember to be and what I desire to become. I am left seeing myself as a fool - a result that forbids the possibility of either illusion.

 

 

Last Radio On

originally written on a typewriter

This typewriter belonged to my grandmother. She had used it in high school. Once she graduated, this machine was no longer useful to her. Packing it first in the closet, it was later moved to the attic, then into the basement, and then into my lap. For her, the typewriter helped earn praise in the classroom; for me, it helped get laughs by writing cheap wit, making a spectacle of the whole act. A compact information exchange machine became an entertainment box for rat-tat-tatting stories. Borrowing on the experience of the keys, I could type out my unconscious more legibly.

My grandmother favors writing letters by hand.

The high school building was razed a last year.

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The following photographs were made with large view camera, which resembles a misshapen accordion. This type of photography, ensnared by obsolescence, romanticizes a modernity it once helped represent into a stylized form of remembering. To copy the world through these tinted glasses forever represents the present as a past that never existed. These melodramatic images only look onto a past embarrassingly dense with mystery, yet insist to remember accurately.