15 Minutes
"Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart" -Rainer Maria Rilke
It's hard to describe the way everything occurred back then. Most things were rushing and crashing around me. I had moved away from New Orleans less than a year before Hurricane Katrina devastated the first place that felt like home to me. By my second year in New York, all of what I had left behind shifted tremendously. New Orleans was deluged, my grandmother had passed away and my father called one night from California to tell me he had been sentenced to 27 months in a federal prison for a blue-collar crime I didn’t pry far into knowing too much about.
On October 7th, 2005 my father made a trip up the California highway to turn himself in. Coincidentally, I had surrendered that day too. My body was radiating with fever. Rushed to an emergency medicine clinic, I was prescribed various pills and was bedridden for several weeks with an illness blood tests couldn't pinpoint. My father called to tell me he was turning himself in as I lay on the examination table. My throat was swollen shut and my body was damp with sweat. I honestly don't remember being able to say anything back. It was as if I had been in a thick haze, preventing me from feeling loss. Within weeks I received a large box in the mail containing all of his possessions and the loss set in.
Over those first few months our roles flopped. I was the parental figure, and my father, the child, was declaring his fears while 3000 miles away. I became a receptacle for the myriad of emotions and experiences he was going through while in his first year in prison. His descriptions and stories shook me tremendously and I began to try and make sense of it. We spoke for 15 minutes a week and I wrote down almost everything he said. I absorbed his words, photographing the loss his new circumstances had created. I reopened family albums. I searched through his belongings, wondering who this man was. I listened intently.
The collection of images shown here is deeply tied together by the string of time that occurred during my father’s incarceration. It is shown with excerpts from the 15-minute phone calls between my father and me, which were permitted each week during his sentence. These images serve as the closest connection I was able to have with him during that intangible time.
It's hard to describe the way everything occurred back then. Most things were rushing and crashing around me. I had moved away from New Orleans less than a year before Hurricane Katrina devastated the first place that felt like home to me. By my second year in New York, all of what I had left behind shifted tremendously. New Orleans was deluged, my grandmother had passed away and my father called one night from California to tell me he had been sentenced to 27 months in a federal prison for a blue-collar crime I didn’t pry far into knowing too much about.
On October 7th, 2005 my father made a trip up the California highway to turn himself in. Coincidentally, I had surrendered that day too. My body was radiating with fever. Rushed to an emergency medicine clinic, I was prescribed various pills and was bedridden for several weeks with an illness blood tests couldn't pinpoint. My father called to tell me he was turning himself in as I lay on the examination table. My throat was swollen shut and my body was damp with sweat. I honestly don't remember being able to say anything back. It was as if I had been in a thick haze, preventing me from feeling loss. Within weeks I received a large box in the mail containing all of his possessions and the loss set in.
Over those first few months our roles flopped. I was the parental figure, and my father, the child, was declaring his fears while 3000 miles away. I became a receptacle for the myriad of emotions and experiences he was going through while in his first year in prison. His descriptions and stories shook me tremendously and I began to try and make sense of it. We spoke for 15 minutes a week and I wrote down almost everything he said. I absorbed his words, photographing the loss his new circumstances had created. I reopened family albums. I searched through his belongings, wondering who this man was. I listened intently.
The collection of images shown here is deeply tied together by the string of time that occurred during my father’s incarceration. It is shown with excerpts from the 15-minute phone calls between my father and me, which were permitted each week during his sentence. These images serve as the closest connection I was able to have with him during that intangible time.
