Once Upon A Place

Once Upon A Place

It's strange sometimes what sparks a memory. A keepsake, an ornament, a favorite chair. It's difficult to say why something can so forcibly imprint itself on your memory more than others. For me, as a lifelong fan of metaphor, I have several that immediately come to mind. There was, in a particularly dark period of my life, a time when I recall seeing a broken picture and frame in the hallway of my home left on the floor. To me it was a symbol of the fracturing of my family at that time, entrenched as it was in the aftermath of divorce.

Years later I used that metaphor of the broken picture in a song I wrote about the past (…"when pieces of a picture fall and gather in the back of the hall, you'll have no sympathy…"). There are others I can recall, but none of them are really the point here. I wanted this image to be about mourning the past, revisiting it and trying to trace the path you are on in the present into the past to find its origins.

Contemporary cultural rhetoric will tell you to not live or dwell in the past, but I disagree to a point. I feel it is important to know the how, the when, the line to follow back to discover who you are and why you are the way you seem to be. Analysis demands it, and I suspect a lot of us , especially as we age, do spend more time dining on ashes that we care to admit.

And so this fairly simple image is about revisiting the past, trying to feel it again. We see a devastated and barren wasteland (this was shot at the Salton Sea last month), and the man is embracing a chair that seems to have survived the fire in evidence around him. He is revisiting the past, the site of a personal tragedy, and that single chair remaining sparks his memories of the home that used to be there as well. Perhaps it belonged to a family member now deceased, perhaps this is not literally happening, and more a dream. I wanted it to be a metaphor after all, and dreams are filled with them, revealing some internal message in not always the most literal fashion.

Once we move on from events, both tragic and beautiful, it is hard to feel them again, to experience them as we imagined we once did. We hold onto mementos of the past for this reason, to connect with the dead, the younger versions of ourselves, and to keep the past alive in our present. There is, I find, a tinge of sadness in the past, in all those moments that slip away and fade deeper and deeper into the back of our minds, until something calls them to mind again - a broken picture perhaps, a song, or even an old chair.

My title came from a rather odd place - a line from "Burning Down The House" by the Talking Heads - I was trying to find one that fit the image, and though the song is rather stream of consciousness and vague, I thought that particular line fit perfectly (…"it was once upon a place sometimes I listen to myself…").

Model: Ben

A Before and After version of this image will be available on my Facebook page and my website:

www.facebook.com/MichaelBilottaPhotography
www.michaelbilotta.com