Vollmann’s Poor People slightly altered
Soot covered woman of the burned land, Madagascar
Homeless camp under the freeway, Miami
People and streetscapes, Riverton, Oregon
Office cleaning lady just off work with Colonel Sanders
(life-sized statue) Bangkok
“I think they are poor” venerable white-haired man begging,
Beijing
Congolese beggar boy, dressed in filthy rags
Unknown street sleepers
Man in rubble of destroyed home
Man with photo and deed to his destroyed home
Garbage lady, Nanking
Panorama of box houses, Tokyo
Beggar in full body burqa like an angel of death, Yemen
Streetwalker in burqa approaching a rickshaw, Peshawar
Homeless man reading a newspaper in park, Tokyo
Three drunks, Nome, Alaska
Beggar girl with deformed nose
Beggar pretending to be armless, Bangkok
Family in front of their bullet pocked house, Congo
Snarling beggar, Bogotá
Man with crooked face, Bogota
“Donate here to get me out of your neighborhood” placard,
Oregon
Afghan boys playing in wrecked Soviet plane, Afghanistan
Afternoon on Ave de la Mort, Brazzaville
Operation Crossroads 1948: Bikinis, a journal, extractedAs culled from the journals of forward observer
Of Bikini Island tests, Dr. David Bradley, in
his book , NO PLACE TO HIDE
“In the three years of the “atomic age,” five bombs
(or is it six?) have been exploded. On only these last
two or three have men been prepared to study and
record the findings under anything like controlled
conditions.”
“This morning the surface (of the ocean) was
scattered over with tiny floating jellyfish, or baby
men-o-wars. Delicate, diaphanous creatures, they
look like blown cherry blossoms on a windy lawn
of the Pacific.”
“By the nature of our work almost everything we know
is potentially dangerous.”
“Actually, of course, there will never be any great control
of ideas concerned with atomic energy, the principles
have already spread like an epidemic.”
“Lectures on physics have given way to the practical
business of the detection of radioactivity.”
“It will be difficult to convince people of the dangers
of radiation.”
“The persistent power of the bomb after it has exploded is
its greatest menace.”
“They(the old and wise) doze a moment in the sun and
wake up on fire.”
Sante’s Evidence
“Traces of innumerable human beings lost to history
once and for all, without monuments or descendants
or living record.”
“A copy of a Black Hand threat letter, decorated with
obscene drawings.”
“An enigmatic set of shots, from various angels of
a man’s right hand with two thumbs.”
“Magnified views of pieces of jewelry and barely
decipherable snapshots.”
“Studies of urinals at different (police) station houses.”
“Locations: bedrooms, bars, back alleys, vacant lots,
storerooms, hovels hallways”
“You do not have to be glamorous to meet a violent end.”
“Objects of interest, at least momentarily, taken together,
they become stills from a film, a nightmare, ride from room
to room in the small hours.”
“These subjects are constantly in the process towards
obliteration.”
“These photographs-as evidence, they are mere artless
records, concerned with the details…they are the book-
keeping entries, with no transfiguring mission, and serve
death.”
“We are breaking a taboo as old as the practice of shutting
the eyes of cadavers and weighing down their lids.”
“Photography like death, interrupts life.”
“The more empty the photograph, the more it will imply
horror.”
“Empty photographs have no reason to be except to show
that which cannot be shown.”
“Evidence is a magnet for the random.”
“You do not have to be glamorous to meet a violent end.”
Julia Solis’ New York Underground: the Anatomy of a City,
in text and photographs with occasional commentary
Inside the Croton Aqueduct (like The Thing from Outer Space)
Roots (like veins) inside the long-abandoned Croton Aqueduct
Rebuilding the foundation of 7 World Trade Center
A manhole cover leading to a branch of Croton Aqueduct (like
a portal to the outer circles of hell)
Sealed water pipes to a branch of Ridgewood Reservoir
with graffiti, Brooklyn
The gate chamber on the Bronx side of High Bridge (with
standing water and garbage)
Inside a storm drain Queens
Ghost Stations:
City Hall station abandoned retaining some of its former glory
Abandoned 91st street station with elaborate graffiti
Sealed staircase lower-level City Hall station
Remnant of obsolete trolley station Essex and Delancy
Long abandoned Croton Aqueduct well on its way to being
reclaimed by nature
Virginal track segment, never used
Ghostly staircase eastern end of Lexington Ave. station
Ground Zero October 2001
Long after last transport, a gurney in a tunnel, Seaview Hospital
Mattresses piled in deteriorating heaps in basement of a mental
hospital
Obsolete freight track, Hell’s Kitchen
Long forgotten abandoned burial crypts
The central aisle of the crypt of St. Patrick’s cathedral
A Plague of Souls: Contemporary (Mostly) Japanese Noir
Devotion of Suspect X
Tokyo Nights
Hotel Lucky Seven
Sleeping Dragon
All She Was Worth
In the Miso Soup
Coin Locker Baby
The Devil’s Flute
Slow Fuse
Three Assassins
Bullet Train
Crossfire
Grotesque
Real World
Out
Winter Sleep
Almost Transparent Blue
The Memory Police
Village of Eight Graves
Freud
On Aphasia
Interpretation of Dreams
Secret Memories
The Future of Illusion
The Ego and the ID
Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious
The Psychology of Everyday Life
“Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Illness
The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation of Erotic Life
Mourning and Melancholy Civilization and Its Discontents
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Medusa’s Head
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the psychic lives
of savages and neurotics
Reflections on War and Death
A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychic Analytic
theory of disease
Case Studies: Dora
Little Hans
Rat Man
Wolfman
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
Brutal (Soviet) Bloc Post Cards“Ideas are more powerful than guns.
We would not let our enemies have
guns, why should we let them have ideas?
Joseph Stalin
Monument to Builders of the Volga Power Station 1967
Worker and Collective Farm Women (statues) circa 1960’s
(Literal) Flower of Life (concrete sculpture) 1968
Monument to the Conquerors of Near Universe 1988
Monument to the Conquerors of Space (glass ellipse) 1964
A Special Sign at the entrance to the city, Brest,
(indescribable) 1987
Memory of Military Glory, Moldavia 1983
Karl Marx Monument, Tashkent, 1980 (Flyaway concrete hair)
Kulpenberg TV Tower (“beehive” on concrete tower)
Avala TV Tower, Belgrade (pointed as a needle)
Slovak Tower Building, Bratislava 1983 (inverted pyramid)
Brotherly Mound, Hillock of Fraternity Memorial Complex,
Bulgaria 1980
Museum of the revolution, Lithuania SSR 1980
Obelisk of Glory, Modavic, 1972
Concrete arch known as Andropov’s Ears, Tbilisi, Georgia 1983
Museum to the Defenders of the Caucasian Mountain Passes,
1983 (Concrete henges rising)
Monuments to the heroic Sailors of the Black Sea, 1971
All-Terrain Vehicle Monument to the Pioneers 1987
Broken Ring Monument, Lake Lagoda, 1966
Monument to the Communists Who Died in September
1923 Uprising, Bulgaria
Alyosha Monument to the Defenders of the Soviet Arctic,
Murmansk, 1986
Armenian Genocide Memorial Cemetery Complex 1967
The Sash of Glory, Odessa 1975 (glorious silhouette carved
From concrete)
The Constinesti Obelisk-Constinesti Beach, 1970 (White
Polished marblesque, whatever on the beach front)
Star Monument Kharkiv, Ukraine 1975
Monument to the executed partisans, Yugoslavia
Arch of Diversity, monument dedicated to the unification
Of the USSR and Ukraine 1982
