12 Images in the Guise of Grapes
Celebrating ordinary moments.
Arlington Heights, IL, December 31st, 2024
I am, once again, in my mother’s apartment in Illinois to close the year. In the bedroom where I stay there’s a closet with the entire family archive: photo albums, documents, slides, and lots and lots of home movies.
The 8mm film format was invented by the film industry sometime in the 1930s for amateur and home use, although it was not only the postwar period when its use boomed, especially after the advent of the Super 8 film format in 1965 and the simple and convenient camera used for that purpose—one of which my family owned. The oldest film we have is from 1957— my parent’s wedding— and the last one is from 1980, part of which I shot as a kid (a sequence of our family’s dog, Igor).
Because these rolls of film were not cheap, and they only had 50 feet of film each (around 3 minutes of duration) and it could not be overwritten (like video later could), one had to really think what one was going to commit to posterity. Maybe as a result of that, the vast majority of non-artistic home movies is fairly predictable in that they depict “special” occasions, such as weddings, birthdays, travel, and Christmas celebrations (a fascinating exploration of this topic was done by Ron Magliozzi Brittany Shaw and Katie Trainor in MoMA’s exhibition Private Lives, Public Spaces). Of course, like with any other medium, artists to over the Super 8 format and made a variety of experimental uses of it (I also included a ghost-like actor shot in Super 8 as part of a performance I presented in 1993).
Clearly the logistical and financial constraints of documenting our lives have largely been overcome, and this year we started seeing ads for the latest iPhone offering nearly unlimited storage options:
However, even while we now can document the most banal aspects of our lives without giving it a second thought, we still have the need to create highlights- the most memorable moments of the year, the “best of” lists. My small contrarian position just for today is that perhaps it is more interesting to document everyday moments, moments that are, if not perfectly forgettable, small footnotes: that is, things that we will think of not perhaps a single or particular moment in our lives like a birth, a wedding or an award, but something that will be engrained in something perhaps more important, a long-term sense of self. So, this is that I have tried to do here, with 12 images, each representing the 12 months of the year and the symbolic grapes we traditionally eat in Latin America and Spain as a ritual to mark the moment the new year chimes in. one of them was a piece of amber I saw in a museum in San Cristóbal de las Casas, containing an insect that was trapped in it 22 million years ago; Samuel Beckett’s phone at a museum in Dublin, the phantasmagoric feeling I had one night at the Camino Real hotel in Mexico City, a couple embracing in the floor under an overpass in Hoboken, New Jersey, reminding me of a photograph by Cartier Bresson of a similar scene of affection in Hoboken; The sign of a store in Fresno saying “Things Reimagined”, taken on a hot summer weekend where the temperature was 105F; the last school bus ride that Estela, on her last day of middle school, would have to take in her life; a cheesy beach stand in Málaga where I was stranded for three days; a haunted house scene by the artist Theodora Skipitares in the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, New York; A Shaker gift drawing, an image taken of common reed grass at the Brooklyn Salt Marsh in Marine Park, Brooklyn, and a decorated wall, ostensibly of a picturesque Italian town, in a pizzeria in the Chicago suburbs.
These are images that probably won’t feature in the proverbial super 8 film review of my life on my last living moments, yet they all contain lived experiences that are meaningful to me but that I can’t communicate to others. But I share them to make the point that I believe we all keep those moments— passing, sometimes banal, yet defining. I invite you to think of yours in the comment section— you will see how enjoyable the experiment is. Think of your images as your 12 new year grapes.
I thus wish you all a 2025 of great fulfillment and success— but more importantly, a year where you can collect another handful of meaningful, everyday moments.