I loved Jason, always will … but I won’t claim I loved his Leavings project. I liked it at first. He had a point of view and he came up with some great images. But a lot of serious photographers had worked that ruined-buildings-in-decaying-rust-belt-towns trope. I’d seen beautifully produced oversized books devoted to abandoned hospitals, schools and movie theaters in cities like Detroit. And even though Jason’s obsessive pursuit of stuff left behind in abandoned houses was unique, I didn’t see it leading anywhere. I also found it overly melancholic. He wasn’t looking for beauty in the ruins and mold like the other ‘lust-for-rust’ guys. He seemed intent on straight documentation. I guess I thought he was trying to say something that people already knew.
I think the stuff he found in those houses meant something special to him, something he couldn’t explain. He had a tenderness toward people who lacked privilege and struggled to get by. Who wouldn’t love a guy like that?
He told me many times that his conflict photographer days had burned him out on photographing people under stress. He’d decided, he told me, to devote himself to still-life work – not, he emphasized, beautifully lit arrangements of objects with different and intriguing shapes, but, as he put it, ‘stills that tell a story.’ But there was plenty of risk, physical as well as legal, breaking into abandoned houses. That’s why he partnered up with Tally; he needed someone to watch his back. So in a sense, I thought, his exploration into the artifacts of ruined lives was akin to his former career – pursuit of danger, adventure and the high he got from not knowing what might happen next.
He knew I felt this way. We frequently exchanged critiques, while always respecting each other’s intentions. And even when our comments were less than fully enthusiastic, we always listened carefully to what the other had to say.
My personal opinion: there was a storehouse of hurt in Jason, a sadness in his background that made left-behind stuff meaningful to him. I don’t know where that came from. Maybe it was his feeling that when his mom abandoned the family, he had been the ‘stuff’ that had been left. When I asked him one time if this was true, he shrugged, but didn’t deny it. Still, no question he believed in his project, which made me think that his conviction would make it work. So even if I didn’t adore what he was doing, I never tried to discourage him.
When he called early that Friday morning, asking to come up and show me some images, I figured they’d be from his Leavings series, and that maybe he felt he’d made a breakthrough. But when I opened my door and saw the glow in his eyes, I was pretty sure this visit was about something else. And then when he showed me the images and told me how he’d discovered them, I understood his excitement … for I felt it too.
I think ‘enraptured’ would be a better word. Or ravished. Or in thrall. And his tale, the way he told it, added extra heat to his discovery.
‘It was a eureka moment,’ he said. ‘Like this is what I’ve been waiting to find since Tally and I started on the project. Then to just stumble on it in that nothing house! I knew as soon as I poked my head through the hole in the floor that this was something big!’ He paused. ‘But of course it wasn’t a “nothing house.” It was a strange house, not like any other – on a strange street, too. The whole place gave off a vibe.’ He gazed at me. ‘What’d you think?’
I had some thoughts but wasn’t ready to express them. He was excited enough, keyed up like an artist in a manic fit of creativity, and I could see that he was struggling to stay calm. Anyway, I tend to distrust my first reactions. He’d barely slept, and now he’d come to me for validation. I wanted to be sure my own excitement derived from the power of the murals, and not because I’d been swept up in his feverish account of finding them.
‘The size of them! The way they dominate that little room. I know my images can’t convey that.’
‘Hey, take a breath,’ I told him. ‘Take your coffee out on the terrace while I study them. I’ll join you in a while and then we’ll talk.’
‘Sure, Hannah. Cast a cold eye.’ He smiled. ‘You’re good at that.’
OK, I thought, after he’d left me alone, this isn’t about Jason’s photography. It’s about a set of murals he discovered and documented. So forget these are pictures of pictures. Look at these murals as a work of art.
As I ran the images through his laptop, peering closely, trying to piece them together in my head, I had to admit that the cumulative effect was compelling. And, I thought, it would be even more so if I’d come upon them the way he’d described. There was, I thought, an ‘outsider art’ aspect to them, a mix of sophistication and naïveté. Perhaps they were by an artist who was talented yet not fully skilled. The drawing struck me as a bit cartoonish. The expressions on the characters’ faces weren’t subtle. There was no doubt they were leering. The double-faced figures, which Jason said he found so evocative, struck me as attempts at psychological portraiture. But I found the overall concept powerful: full-length, life-size frontal images of people on four walls facing one another, or perhaps observing something in between. And on the far right of one wall, a little girl on hands and knees with a puppy, peering with eyes filled with wonderment from behind an adult woman’s legs – that was extraordinary, I thought, as if she were a voyeur who had snuck into the scene and was gazing out at something forbidden.
I was also impressed by the scope of the work, the commitment by the artist to a major project. These murals must have meant a great deal to him. They spoke of a huge investment of emotion. What else would compel someone to climb into an attic, seal up the windows, then create something on such a scale? In this sense it reminded me of one of those weirdly powerful outsider artworks that rare individuals have created out of an inexplicable inner need, works like the Watts Towers in LA, or the obsessive drawings of Henry Barger, works that perhaps started out small but then grew very large, illustrating stories they were seeking to tell themselves which they likely couldn’t tell any other way.
Looking back, I think it was the figures’ eyes that got to Jason. He had this thing for eyes. His book on Aleppo was called The Eyes of Aleppo. In every photo there was someone looking straight at his lens, making direct eye contact with the viewer. In a way, I think the murals are also about the figures’ eyes. Some people think it’s the mouths, the somewhat cruel way they’re turned. But I think to Jason it was those people’s eyes. What were they telling him? When I asked him about that, he shrugged. But I felt that he had seen eyes like those before, sometime in his life. Or were they his own eyes, and he’d seen them in a mirror?
Jason was looking for something; he didn’t know what. He told me this when I asked him why he kept going on his Leavings project long after he had more than enough images.
‘I keep thinking,’ he said.
‘Thinking what?’ I asked.
‘There’s more.’
‘More what?’
‘More to be seen, to be found.’
Well, now it seemed he’d found that ‘more.’ Stumbled upon it, as he put it. And now he was hooked!
I must have spent an hour scrolling through the images before I went on to my terrace to talk to him. I found him sound asleep on one of my chaises longues. Smoke hung in the air. There’d recently been a lot of fires in the city. The sun had risen and was already beating down. Reluctant to wake him, I rolled a sun umbrella to the chaise and arranged it so it shadowed his face. Then I went back inside, knowing sooner or later he’d wake up and come back in to talk.
He appeared half an hour later, rubbing his eyes.
‘Sorry I fell off,’ he said. ‘Barely slept last night. I’m thirsty as hell.’
I poured him a glass of water. He thanked me for setting up the umbrella.
‘It’s wicked hot out there. I didn’t want my best friend to get burned.’ I looked at him. ‘We have a lot to talk about.’
He listened closely as I told him what I thought about the murals.
‘They’re not like anything else I’ve seen. That alone makes them interesting. I think they might be about feelings … rejection and humiliation. The frontality of them – I find that extraordinary. And I love the little girl and the dog. Also the consistency of the artist’s vision. I think whoever painted these knew exactly what he wanted to do from the start. Fill up the four walls. Arrange the same number of figures on each. Show them all reacting to each other or to whatever was happening in the middle of the room.’
‘What do you suppose that was?’
‘From reading their faces, something dark. That’s why these murals are so powerful. We can’t see what they’re seeing, but we can imagine it based on their collective gaze, their malice and scorn. And the little girl – she’s different, still uncorrupted. That tells us something too.’ I paused. ‘We keep saying “he” wanted this, “he” painted that. What if the artist wasn’t a “he”? Maybe it was that girl. Maybe this whole thing is about a memory of something she saw—’
‘That she wasn’t supposed to see. Like she snuck in there, nobody noticed her, and then she saw … whatever.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too.’
He told me he wanted to make a model of the room – piece his images together, blow them up, laminate them on to cardboard, then set them up facing one another exactly as arranged on the walls. He thought that would give him a better idea of the work and ignite new insights.
‘I asked Tally to find out whatever he can about the house – who owns it, why they’re still paying taxes on it, why there’re all those bunk beds upstairs, what the hell was going on in there. I also want to go back and take another look.’ He paused. ‘Would you come with me?’
I thought about it. That would be a way for him to test his first impression and for me to experience the work firsthand. But I was hesitant. I didn’t know if I could handle sneaking in, crawling in through a rear window, taking the chance of being caught.
‘What about first getting an outside opinion? I have a friend, Anna, who wrote her doctoral thesis on art brut. She works in fundraising at CMA, also curates their outsider art collection. She found a donor who’s into it, persuaded her to fund some acquisitions. Turns out the public loves that stuff. She’s trying to get the museum to establish a department of outsider art.’
Jason was skeptical, said he was a long way from wanting to reveal what he’d found. Also, he didn’t want to admit to breaking into a property that hadn’t been legally abandoned.
‘We’ll just show her your photos and ask her to evaluate them. We’ll set ground rules – no questions about where you found them. I’ve known her a long time. She really knows the field, always attends the annual Outsider Art Fair in New York. I think if we showed her these photos, she’d tell us honestly what she thinks.’
It took Jason the weekend to stitch together four master images, print them out on four-foot-wide sheets, laminate them and construct his model. Saturday and Sunday we were in and out of each other’s lofts numerous times. Once he had the model built and set up on a table, we designated the walls A, B, C and D. Then we began to see things in them we hadn’t fully noticed before.
The little girl crouching in the corner of Wall A was depicted further back than we first thought, not close to the legs of the woman beside her, but in what looked like a doorway lost in the gloom behind.
Although we’d thought the four sets of figures were standing in limbo, we were now able to make out a kind of structure behind them on Wall C. Perhaps a chimney or maybe a tall window; there was something structural back there left undefined.
We also observed that a nearly identical pair of characters, a double-faced man and woman in the center of Wall A, appeared again on Wall C.
‘I’m starting to see these people as chess pieces,’ Jason said. ‘That pair in the middle, King and Queen, opposing another King and Queen across the way.’
But he was quick to agree that the chess analogy didn’t hold. So why did the artist repeat this pair? What role had they played in the drama … if, in fact, a drama was what this work was about?
‘I think this thing is based on a memory, but stylized and distorted like in a dream.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘A haunting vision by a haunted artist. There’s a story in there.’
‘A mystery story,’ Jason said.