i like to tell stories

The day I went through this one stack, I pulled out these three. A tree shadow on a cold day in Queens, NY. A friend in New Paltz, NY. A dead bird in a place on a street I cannot recall tonight as I write this. All I know about this bird tonight is that it can no longer take flight.

I was sad as Chili’s® will forever mean one thing to me and there is nothing that can really change that one thing however this was not that Chili’s®, so I did my best to pretend I couldn’t remember why Chili’s® means what it does. Then this redhead walked up and served me my potato soup.

Three days before Christmas I met her again. I was again at this one Chili’s® in Texas, I was again sad and this time she served me my hamburger, only this time she was not a nerd, she was a reindeer.

This time, I did not let this mean nothing. I left the table my family was sitting at and trapped the poor girl near the waitress stand. I simply said I was in town for a short while and would like to someday, somehow photograph her. She looked at me for a moment as a smile appeared across her face and she simply said, “High five!” We high fived one another and would later meet on three different occasions shortly there after to make photographs before I left Texas.

One night in between our three days on the first new night of the New Year, she called me at 3:12 AM and told me to go outside. There standing on the front lawn of my parent’s house in Texas in my underwear in thirty-degree weather, I did as she requested. I looked up at the moon… It was full, it was blue and I’ll never see how all these things could ever align more then once in such a moon.

Before we met to make photographs for the first time, I asked her to text me a photograph of herself in her Halloween glasses and to text me a photograph of herself in her antlers and to my surprise, she did. Before day one of photographing, she told me her name meant tree by the water so as requested, this was to be the first place I would photograph her and this is where we found this feather.

(if your phone ends in 7861, some kids & a Henry may have your phone and they want money)

An older then me gentlemanly man started talking with her, I think she struck it up actually, points to the New Yorker he was reading. Who says magazines are dead? He departed a few stops later and she pulled out a book, I kept fidgeting with my camera. The train stopped short and fast at the next station bumping us into each other and again we exchanged our quiet disappointment.

As she went back to reading, before I consciously even knew it was aloud, I said, “Who made those shoes?” We chatted and I asked her if I could take a photograph of one of them, she smiled, was agreeable and stuck her foot out. So I did, I took a photograph. I also told her I wanted to take one on the platform while they were on that great yellow stripe, but that I was too shy to ask.

touch the image for a 15s video

December 25, 2006 | 2 Years Old
(still image January 16, 2010)

– transcribed from a voice over by Irakly Avaliani, in a work by Gueorgui Pinkhassov

– transcribed from a voice over by Irakly Avaliani, in a work by Gueorgui Pinkhassov

It has one flaw, a flaw that is mine and given the short history of events since this books existence, I now consider this flaw an ideal one. If someone ends up owning this copy, I will explain it to them when they ask and when they prove to me they indeed have it.

As of this moment, this is the only copy of this book there will be but I make no such promise to keep it buried forever or not created anew.

As of this moment, only one person besides myself has seen this book. This person was my mother and it was shared with her on a day that was her 66th birthday. I placed it in a hot yellow beam of Texas sunlight and made these final images of this object. The printing does not show as well as it truly is in these photographs below…

I received two stories of “Merry Fucking Christmas” from two people that don’t know one another. One directly and one indirectly, both I think about the same thing but I will never know the true intent of one of these. Both however were sent from a place of lonely or simply being alone.

I made something tangible and quite special to give away and then did, albeit in ways and in reasons I never intended, but just as special if not more so. Around this same time, I received a gift I never expected, not tangible and very fleeting, but quite real in its false moments.

Before I left New York on my current journey, I was able to go to a special place and allowed to leave with two of what this place makes special without leaving any of my cash or my heart behind for these rewards.