Dead Light : Salem, Photography, Stolen Valuable Bottles of Wine, and Dylan Hausthor
Contact Sheet - Light Work Annual
2024
Contact Sheet - Light Work Annual
2024
THEY took the intro song to Salem’s Fires in Heaven off Spotify. This bummed me out because I thought it was a great intro to this collapsitarian record refracted from the collapsing world and released into our isolated homes in fall 2020 when Dylan and I were trapped in New Haven, CT. Unlike a lot of albums and styles blossoming from the rise of digital streaming, I thought this album needed to be listened to from start to finish in order to feel something directional and visceral addressing what it feels like to be alive right now—unintelligible, unexpected highs and bottomed-out, crushing hangovers all filled with paranoid regret, hoping it will ALL be over soon. This twenty-nine-minute-and-forty-four-second sequential weaving was my welcomed counter before the election and to the quick-clicking ADHD déjà vu of weaving in and out of screens of floating faces. In those pixels I found myself wishing I had the physical connective roots of the trees instead of these divided bodies and minds laid out in glowing grids—I don’t want to be a part of the fucking Brady Bunch.
Now there’s only a ghost at the beginning of the digital stream. The word Capulets lowered in contrast receding to the background but still there in the digital player. I guess there was a copyright issue with a sample Salem used. The group tried to reuse a piece from the past, and when they created from and with something already in the world it vanished, creating a hole in the album, specifically and importantly at the beginning. Now, only because I know the past, I enter the album unsure of how I got here. Like, I feel what I did to get here, but I don’t know what it was—much like Dylan’s photographs—taking the root of something that already existed in the world, crushing it with light, smashing up shadows and filling in others, all to be thrown in a tray in the red light in a discarded room with some hard water, waiting for something new to emerge to haunt others.
But there has to be a start somewhere with Dylan’s photographs and practice, other than me just rambling about a Salem album, right? Black-and-white photographs have historically been read as truthful, objective documents, and Dylan is dancing in that tension . . . sure, but that’s been beaten to death and if anyone has any faith in images to truthfully record in an objective light, or has patience for that conversation around how a photographer is subverting the medium by questioning its truthfulness again, then god bless ya and I wish I still had my naivety because then I could probably sleep better and my blood pressure wouldn’t be so high. OK, maybe they’re lit, cropped, cast in gray tones, solely for the sake of being weird to put on Instagram to feed the machine’s upper-middle-class users and make them think oh maybe I should leave my $3,000 apartment and move to the woods. No, even though these vultures linger longer than the turkey vultures that circled my grandparents’ farmhouse waiting for free flesh. At least those turkey vultures didn’t buy up all the film. Enough with my sarcastic angst toward the medium—I’ve been on Instagram too much.
Those conversations—less the Instagram one—are still valid and part of the ballet Dylan is choreographing through a hazy performance with a bastard medium. But I don’t want to end on that, I want to address the stars. Where Dylan started—I want to finish in dead light murdered by shepherds in a drunken rage after stealing a valuable bottle of wine. Here in this light puncturing a deep void I’m looking for patterns and finding patterns where there are none. We seek patterns because we need the comfort that we are in control. We seek this in our heads walking down a new street trying to find something familiar to a path we once walked in hopes of not being completely shocked by being here—wait, where am I?—or in a barn that reminds us of our late grandfather while doing whippits at three in the morning, or in the use of a medium that can only begin with light sculpted on the familiar. We seek this in groups to convince ourselves we’re not alone and crazy, or that we really are crazy, just not alone—organized religion, punk shows, book fairs, AA meetings, hunting, baseball games, the Bohemian Grove, Instagram. These are places for stories to collide with our reality, sculpting our imagination, interfering with our reality, lighting a spark in the corner of our eye and influencing our feelings of what we thought we knew. And in all these stories, fragments, and associations, Dylan starts and I end.
Now there’s only a ghost at the beginning of the digital stream. The word Capulets lowered in contrast receding to the background but still there in the digital player. I guess there was a copyright issue with a sample Salem used. The group tried to reuse a piece from the past, and when they created from and with something already in the world it vanished, creating a hole in the album, specifically and importantly at the beginning. Now, only because I know the past, I enter the album unsure of how I got here. Like, I feel what I did to get here, but I don’t know what it was—much like Dylan’s photographs—taking the root of something that already existed in the world, crushing it with light, smashing up shadows and filling in others, all to be thrown in a tray in the red light in a discarded room with some hard water, waiting for something new to emerge to haunt others.
But there has to be a start somewhere with Dylan’s photographs and practice, other than me just rambling about a Salem album, right? Black-and-white photographs have historically been read as truthful, objective documents, and Dylan is dancing in that tension . . . sure, but that’s been beaten to death and if anyone has any faith in images to truthfully record in an objective light, or has patience for that conversation around how a photographer is subverting the medium by questioning its truthfulness again, then god bless ya and I wish I still had my naivety because then I could probably sleep better and my blood pressure wouldn’t be so high. OK, maybe they’re lit, cropped, cast in gray tones, solely for the sake of being weird to put on Instagram to feed the machine’s upper-middle-class users and make them think oh maybe I should leave my $3,000 apartment and move to the woods. No, even though these vultures linger longer than the turkey vultures that circled my grandparents’ farmhouse waiting for free flesh. At least those turkey vultures didn’t buy up all the film. Enough with my sarcastic angst toward the medium—I’ve been on Instagram too much.
Those conversations—less the Instagram one—are still valid and part of the ballet Dylan is choreographing through a hazy performance with a bastard medium. But I don’t want to end on that, I want to address the stars. Where Dylan started—I want to finish in dead light murdered by shepherds in a drunken rage after stealing a valuable bottle of wine. Here in this light puncturing a deep void I’m looking for patterns and finding patterns where there are none. We seek patterns because we need the comfort that we are in control. We seek this in our heads walking down a new street trying to find something familiar to a path we once walked in hopes of not being completely shocked by being here—wait, where am I?—or in a barn that reminds us of our late grandfather while doing whippits at three in the morning, or in the use of a medium that can only begin with light sculpted on the familiar. We seek this in groups to convince ourselves we’re not alone and crazy, or that we really are crazy, just not alone—organized religion, punk shows, book fairs, AA meetings, hunting, baseball games, the Bohemian Grove, Instagram. These are places for stories to collide with our reality, sculpting our imagination, interfering with our reality, lighting a spark in the corner of our eye and influencing our feelings of what we thought we knew. And in all these stories, fragments, and associations, Dylan starts and I end.