I’ve been staring at my window fan for close to an hour now, its constant revolutions still unable to clear away this lingering fog of anxiety I’ve had for the last five weeks. Today however, it briefly incited a recollective stream of photographs that I associate with the concept of wind: Jungjin Lee’s immense monograph of the same name. The repeated attempts, failures, and eventual triumph of Wolfgang Tillmans’s creation of The Air Between. The bookend sequences in The Moth (Jem Southam). Now it’s been two hours. The fan still spins, the world still turns. This writing feels gratuitous and self-indulgent as I’ve never crafted any sort of authored voice: I love stream-of-consciousness but hate confessionalism.

While being both diaristic and overly assumptive, I don’t believe any of my writing will be able to operate without the immediate visual aid of images referenced; I’m not talented enough at written description, while numbered footnotes or endpage indexes seem like afterthoughts that would betray the experience of how the images connect to each other in my memory.

*The Air Between,* a work by Wolfgang Tillmans in which the artist spent years working on images that translate the relationship a person feels within one’s own body, in this case the feeling of air and the empty space between our skin and our clothes.

I would love to eventually address each of these as an individual piece or writing, but for now the loose link between multiple artists serves as an introduction as well as a trial for me to determine this imagined audience’s interests. At the moment I believe that the value in any of my rambling tangents lie in providing new threads of context to developing photographers more than any philosophical analysis for art critics or non-practicing readers.

The beginning and end sequences of *The Moth*, an iconic photobook by Jem Southam, are marked by a series of images taken from the window of a rocking boat during a storm at sunrise.

These aqueous thoughts I’ve always (drunkenly) accosted friends with, initially in person and now in my isolation over phone calls and zooms, but never put down to the page in the fear of permanence. But lately, with the hopes of escaping the bleak situation I find myself waning towards somber acceptance and my body beginning to noticeably fail, I feel a desire to have some record of thought; not to be lost to an oral history held in dark bars or white cubes celebrating other artists.

I’d love to end this beginning with the last image that came to mind in the tangent that lifted me from my bed to this computer; a work from artist collective PaJaMa that stands as one of my favorite photographs of all time. The portrait presents the illusion of a drop shadow on the surface of the landscape itself, created by an almost invisible second figure. While brought to the conversation through the landscape and the tonal relationship to Jungjin’s work that started this train of thought, it branches away towards concepts of visual perception, light and performance. As Lange & Gibson said, all that’s needed is a point of departure.

PaJaMa, *Paul Cadmus and Margaret French, Provincetown, c. 1947*

Where do we go from here?

-Devin Blaskovich