An Unkindness

The subjects in An Unkindness are men on the dating website Ashley Madison ("Life is short. Have an affair"). They were knowing and willing participants in my photographic interpretation of Haruki Murakami's short story, Nausea 1979*.  I approached these subjects with full disclosure. I was transparent about my project, relationship perspectives, and intimate desires.

The Murakami story is about a jazz-loving man that sleeps with his friends' wives and girlfriends. Out of the blue, he suffers from nausea and vomiting, which started on the same day as the nightly crank calls. This pattern lasts for 40 days and 40 nights and stops as abruptly as it starts. The protagonist acknowledges his actions would cause hurt if discovered, but he doesn't alter his behavior. Instead, he persists, not giving in to the physical and mental depletion caused by the vomiting and nightly disturbances. He even gets new suits tailored to fit his new form.

As a photographer, I went from complicit actor to metaphorical choreographer. The project began with raw, in situ point & shoot imagery mixed with digital artifacts from dozens of men. It evolved into directed, staged portraits where a subject became the photographer, photographing reenactments of the other men's moments of betrayal. I was the director and a voyeur.

During the most raw, ravenous, and surreal season of my life, when a story like Nausea 1979 was salt in a fresh, personal wound, I followed the carrion birds on the coldest days of winter and directed my subjects out of their protective layers, barely obscured from sight from the road.    

This journey was a privilege. It was a violation. It was enlightening. It was base. It was delusive. It was visceral. It was nauseating.

*Why Nausea 1979? The concept to create a body of work from this particular short story was not mine. It was a graduate assignment. A cruelly serendipitous one.