RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

Philadelphia

I love this city. I love that I can walk through the largest underground catacomb, the meeting point of the subway, the el, half a dozen underground trolleys and 9 regional rail routes. I love that I can walk through that nexus of transportation on a Saturday afternoon and find myself completely alone. It’s like being the last sinner on earth, scratching his way through a post-rapture apocalypse.

There’s a feeling of emptiness, but there’s also the sense of something enormously powerful. The final witness carries the incredible gift of being the final witness. It’s a privilege greater than being called en masse towards some beckoning light.

Being alone within the enormity of the city colors all that is observed with a thick brush of the surreal. When an events’ only witnesses are a single pair of eyes and the omnipresence of the empty space in which that event happens, you begin to call into question your own perception, or at least your own capacity to truly understand it.

Your only hope at remaining true to the greater witness of the space is to lose your own skewed ego and let yourself become a part of the space itself. I know this sounds troublingly western-filtered-eastern but there’s a difference. The space here is more terrifyingly surreal than any imagined Tibetan mountaintop. This is a city where buildings wander out of the mist like ships from a dream, and pigeons find a place to mate on the backs of sleeping homeless couples. This is why and what I photograph. I need the confirmation of a truly objective eye.

But why am I writing this testimonial? I heard something today that struck me as so arrogant and so incomprehensibly stupid, that I felt I had to share it with the anonymous public.

Like it or not, the steady march of gentrification is carried out in easily predictable stages. Like the early waves of fur trappers and bearded French traders who wandered into the North American woods, the first stage of territorial imperialism in our cities of today comes in the form of artists and self proclaimed outcasts. There is nothing in and of itself wrong with this. Actually, there’s a lot that’s right with it.

My problem comes when an artist complains about his or her neighborhood gentrifying, as if his or her presence in that neighborhood was an isolated event and not indicative of the early stages of that very force. But what really disturbs me, is when that person pines openly for the days when human bodies littered the streets, drug addicts roamed like living ghosts through trash strewn vacant lots and cars were set ablaze nightly in acts of petty destruction and terroristic retribution. Today, I heard a person wishing exactly that for his neighborhood.

As annoying as one might find the conversion of a crack house into a corner café, a vacant lot into a community garden and a hulking mass of a decaying factory into $750,000 lofts (actually I’m not being quite as sarcastic about this last example) I can’t imagine any resident wishing to return to the days of living in a legitimate war zone. The arrogance of that impulse verges on the psychotic.

For a person who is himself a gentrifying force, claiming innocence of the fact and on top of that, wishing for the violent deaths of his pre-gentrification neighbors, is completely insane. The paradoxical loops of reasoning necessary to form such a mindset, perform miracles of self-delusion so powerful, they’d make an Escher print blush.

What makes this city surreal is not, under any circumstances, in any way, shape or form, being threatened. The strangeness of this place runs far deeper than any economic veneer can cover. This is a city where the busiest transportation hub in the most densely populated, wealthiest part of the town sits eerily vacant on Saturday afternoon. The nicely manicured Washington Square Park doubles as a mass grave for thousands of unidentified bodies. If you can’t find inspiration without fresh bodies lying in the streets, then it might be time to find another town.

This city is already full of ghosts. When the streets are empty and you stand alone in the dark; when the wind whipping between buildings makes you feel like you’re standing on some bald mountaintop and not in the middle of a 325-year-old city of a million and a half people; sometimes then you can feel their presence, watching, listening, and whispering their secrets.