Kind of sort of
McNeney
Today’s words are by the photographer, McNeney—for whom a dress that the ocean swallowed up and returned to the shore became a way to escape from an artistic malaise. She tells the story:
October 8: “I found this wedding dress, or should I say the remains thereof, on the beach yesterday, salty, sandy, weedy. It washed up from somewhere, coincidentally right in the place that the ghost of Doris Gravlin is said to appear. She was murdered in 1936. Her body was found on the beach a few days later. She was wearing a knitted dress when she died, but her ghost is said to appear in a wedding dress. Anyway… it’s a thing of beauty, this remnant I dragged home. It seems to have been an inexpensive dress to begin with. After all its salting and beating on rocks and various weatherings, the fabric is so fragile it rips at the slightest pressure.”
October 13: “The day I found the dress, I told the folks I was with that no… absolutely… there was no way I was putting it on. No sirree. But of course curiosity got the best of me. It took a while to get it on, what with the fabric tearing and the buttons stiff with rust. But I did it.
One thing I know about the woman who owned it. She was short. At least in comparison to me. The dress comes to just a few inches below my knees. And no, it wasn’t gross or disgusting to put it on. Sure it smells, but it smells like the sea. And it’s gritty, but it’s clean grit. And yes, it has the remnants of living creatures hardened onto it, but they’re okay too. The ocean can make almost anything okay.”
October 28: “Doris Gravlin’s dress and I went out into the world today. I’ve been envisioning Doris’s dress against a dark stormy sky for weeks now. This is not quite what I was after… but it’s a step along the way. I make no apology for shooting myself. Or for shooting the dress relentlessly. I may not be achieving anything visible but… on some deep level… I think I am making a certain kind of progress.
Shooting myself and the dress is a bit like art students drawing circles. Not so much an end in itself as a way of getting to something else.”
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, meerasethi and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
