The Broken Lens

I feel like if you are going to watch things I make now, it might help to see the roots of my craft in early childhood. Thats all I want to say about this video…

Growing aware of age one does their best to combat it, much to the dismay of the aging body.

This is a preview for a piece I am doing for WHYY’s Newsworks.org, stay tuned for the finished piece.

There is only one way in and out of the neighborhood, down a steep hill of thin patchy road, which is crossed by two sets of train tracks. River Road is the kind of place you have to stumble upon; likely because it’s residents would prefer it to be that way. This enigmatic little neighborhood lays tightly wedged between the Schuylkill and the Manayunk/Norristown Line, which explodes passed every half hour or so. The train tracks are not more than fifty feet from the eclectic mix of trailer homes, two story ranches, and examples modern architecture circa the mid 1980’s.

River Road is a blue-collar neighborhood of contractors, plumbers, police officers, etc. It is the kind of place where everyone seems to know everyone else. On a walk up the street you will see heavy-set men gathered on lawns quietly talking while sipping bottles of cheap beer. The whole of the neighborhood is no more than three feet above water level, so if a good rainstorm hits up-river, the Schuylkill rises, flooding garages and septic tanks. Flooding is typical and the residents put up with it, writing it off as a cost of water front real-estate. After a storm everyone just does their best to clean up and go about their daily lives.

River Road was once used as a short cut to Conshohocken by locals, but was turned into a dead end at the bequest of the residents, since then outsiders have been greeted with skepticism. Chuck Trignani, a resident of River Rd. since 1985, scurries up and down the road in his glossy black rain boots picking up debris from a recent storm. “In the summer people just come down and have picnics down by the water,” Chuck says as he hands a plastic bag of water bottles to the driver of a passing garbage truck, “They think it’s a park or something and that doesn’t go over too well with the neighbors, all they have to do is just ask first and we wouldn’t mind so much.”

I thought it was only fair as a first entry to present myself, and my own biases so that everything that comes after will be in context. I am brash, impulsive, and often times you will see me make assumptions without thinking about them in the hope of stirring debate. I enjoy arguing…about anything really. Additionally I am a liar. I will embellish or even fabricate whole stories. Because really, what’s the difference?

Shot using a Canon L1 Hi8 video camera. Recorded onto VHS tape and digitized. Many of the camera’s capacitors have burst, causing the image to be unstable and unmanageable. Clarity is an illusion, and a crutch. We see a portrait, we recognize features, and we immediately make assumptions. I wanted to make something where to draw conclusions one has to first decide what they are actually seeing before they can move forward. Therefore one’s interpretation of the piece is based entirely on their own internal life.