That is what the title of artist means: one who perceives more than his fellows, and who records more than he has seen. Edward Gordon Craig
What the hell are we supposed to do with theater documentation anyway?
It’s the corpse of the thing, the empty bottle, the setlist scrawled on a napkin after the venue’s already been bulldozed. This Craig quote: “one who perceives more than his fellows, and who records more than he has seen”, that’s the whole sick joke of it. You can’t record what happened in that room. The electricity, the dread in that title playing out in real time, the way bodies move through space when everything’s charged with intent and menace.
I, the photographer see it, sure. Freeze the moment. But the seeing more and the recording more are two different animals eating each other’s tails. What I’ve left you with is evidence of an event you’ll never attend, proof of something that only existed for the people breathing that air. The rest of you just get the crime scene photos and the theater’s assertion that yeah, harm was definitely meant here.
If you need more proof that you weren’t there, that you missed the whole goddamn thing, ☞ click here☜ for the rest of the autopsy photos.
The performance traveled to various sites in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood with the route beginning at 35th Ave and International Blvd; ending at EastSide Cultural Center.
The performance travels to different sites in the Fruitvale neighborhood with the route beginning at 35th Ave and International Blvd; ending at EastSide Cultural Center.
Sutro Bathsbroken concrete pools don’t give a shit about me or my romanticized notion of Victorian grandeur. They just are, salt-scarred, graffitied, filled with seawater and broken glass and the honest stink of kelp and bird shit rotting in the sun. And that’s exactly why SophoclesPhaedra belongs here.
Sophocles understood something we keep forgetting: tragedy isn’t about villains. It’s about people making terrible decisions in terrible moments because panic short-circuits everything we think about being human. Phaedra, not some lascivious foreign bitch but a mother trying to protect her kids when she thinks her husband is dead, reads the room wrong, Hippolytus reads her wrong, and suddenly everybody’s drowning in their own misunderstanding. Nobody’s evil. Everybody’s fucked.
To stage these fragments in some pristine proscenium theater with perfect acoustics and comfortable seats? Please. That’s for plays where things make sense, where motivations are clear, where the architecture itself promises resolution.
But here, these ruins… These pools that were built to hold something civilized and now hold nothing but Pacific chaos twice a day. The tide comes, it goes out. And what was built to contain it? Just ghosts and geometry.
That’s the frame for Phaedra’s panic. That moment when she realizes Theseus isn’t dead, that her political proposal to Hippolytus can be misread as sexual, that she’s trapped, that’s the tide coming in. And her accusation, that desperate lie to save herself that destroys everyone? That’s not wickedness. That’s someone drowning in real time. That’s the human animal thrashing, making it worse, making it deadly.
That late afternoon light coming in low off the Pacific, raking across the broken concrete at angles that turn every crack into a shadow, every pool into a mirror of sky and violence. This isn’t romantic. This is forensic. The light at Sutro doesn’t flatter, it reveals. Every flaw, every mistake in judgment, every place where structure failed and gave way to entropy.
The golden hour at the edge of the continent is not gentle. It’s desperate. It’s the sun clawing its way toward the horizon while the fog bank waits offshore like patient dread. That’s when Phaedra makes her proposal to Hippolytus. That’s when the light makes everything look possible for exactly twenty minutes before it all goes dark.
The fog is a chorus. Not metaphorically, literally. It’s Sophocles‘ web of misunderstanding made physical. Actors vanish into it. Voices come from the wrong directions. Hippolytus hears accusation where Phaedra meant alliance because the fog eats context, leaves only tone, only fear.
The ruins are Theseus. Not a character walking around, the whole damn structure is him. Solid. Imposing. Built to contain the chaos of the ocean and utterly failing at it. Those seven pools at different levels, connected by channels that don’t connect anymore? That’s his empire, his legacy, his family, all compartmentalized, all supposedly controlled, all collapsing into each other as the tide comes in.
Phaedra starts on the upper tier, the one closest to the road, the parking lot, the civilized world of traffic and tourists. That’s Athens. That’s the throne she’s trying to protect for her children. It’s also the least interesting part of the ruins, and that’s perfect. Political power is boring. Safety is boring.
Hippolytus I imagine lives in the lowest pools, the ones that flood first, the ones nearest the cave mouths where seals sometimes haul out and cormorants nest in the cliff face. He’s not civilized. He’s not political. He’s at home with the edge, with the wild, with things that bite. When Phaedra descends to meet him, every step down is a step away from control, from calculation, from the lie she’ll eventually tell.
The site isn’t neutral. It’s not a black box waiting for a vision. It’s got its own weather, its own tides, its own structural decay happening in real time. It’ll upstage actors. It’ll ruin blocking. And if I’m doing this right, I’ll let it. Because Phaedra isn’t a play about people controlling their circumstances. It’s about circumstances obliterating people who thought they had a plan.
The fragments Sophocles left us are enough. More than enough. Because the real tragedy was always in the gaps anyway, in what isn’t said, what can’t be taken back, what the ocean and time have eroded to its essential truth:
An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy, 2017
BUILD LLC is here. The San Francisco Department of Public Health is here. Amy Brownell is here with her PowerPoints and her institutional voice. And the people, the actual people who live here, who breathe this air, who’ve watched their neighbors get sick, they’re here too, and they’re done being polite about it.
Bayview Hunters Point isn’t some abstraction. It’s not a “disadvantaged community” checkbox on some grant application. It’s where people raised families on land the Navy used for decades as a toxic playground where they tested God-knows-what during the Cold War and then walked away whistling. Left it for Tetra Tech to “clean up”, which they did by allegedly faking soil samples like some kind of environmental crimes farce that would be funny if it weren’t so fucking evil.
India Basin. Parcel A. These bureaucratic designations that sanitize what we’re really talking about: land that might kill you. Development projects that promise renewal but deliver the same old pattern, displace the poor, pave over the poison, pretend everything’s fine.
And here’s Amy Brownell from Public Health talking about “restoration” and “land use” while the room fills with people who’ve buried friends, who’ve watched cancer rates that make you want to scream at the sky. The slideshow continues. Professional. Measured. The language of agencies that have learned to talk about problems without ever actually solving them.
You want to know what environmental justice looks like? It looks like this room. It looks like people who’ve been systematically betrayed by every institution that was supposed to protect them, showing up anyway to demand accountability. It’s the opposite of giving up. It’s the refusal to let them memory-hole you, to let them pretend that “vulnerable citizens” is just some phrase in a Ta-Nehisi Coates quote and not actual human beings with names and stories and a right to not be poisoned by their own neighborhood.
The Shipyard looms over all of it, that massive contaminated ghost of American militarism and corporate greed. Lennar wants to build luxury housing there. Luxury fucking housing. On toxic land. Because… Because in San Francisco 2018, even poison can be gentrified if you put enough stainless steel appliances and fiddle fig trees in the rendering.
This meeting is resistance in its purest form: showing up, speaking up, refusing the convenient narrative. BUILD LLC presents their mixed-use development plans like we’re all supposed to believe this time will be different, like the community hasn’t heard these promises before. But the people in this room know the difference between development and development for whom. They know the difference between cleanup and cover-up.
And the whole sick joke is that this shouldn’t require a Task Force with “Environmental Justice Response” in the title. It should just be called “not poisoning people.” But we don’t live in that America. We live in the America where you need a goddamn task force just to get someone to acknowledge that maybe, maybe, you deserve to live on land that won’t give you and your kids cancer.
This Wednesday night in August, in a community facility in the southeast corner of a city that prides itself on being progressive: which is bullshit by the way. This is where all the pretty urban planning talk faces the hard truth of environmental racism, of decades of institutional indifference dressed up as bureaucratic process.
The resistance isn’t heroic or cinematic. It’s exhausting and necessary and it looks like folding chairs and PowerPoint presentations and people who are so tired of fighting but who show up anyway because what else are you going to do? Let these assholes win?
No. You show up. You demand answers. You refuse to be invisible. Even when every system is designed to make you give up, make you fail, you don’t. That’s the story of Bayview Hunters Point. That’s what was happening on Wednesday night. Not a meeting, a reckoning that’s still ongoing, still unresolved, still demanding we ask ourselves what we owe people we’ve spent generations betraying.
Bayview Hunters Point Environmental Justice Response Task Force
Community Meeting, Wednesday August 15th, 2018
Southeast Community Facility San Francisco
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. William Faulkner
I’m not documenting ballet here, I’m documenting an invasion. Real ballet, not the sugar plum bullshit, is already an act of defiance. But when I’m tracking these bodies through my viewfinder as they claim space in Chinatown or in the shadow of some brutalist ruins of Sutro Baths, I’m complicit in something else. I’m saying: watch this happen HERE. Not just in the sanctified spaces where art is supposed to happen, but in the places where people are actually living, grinding through their days, wondering what the fuck it’s all for.
I’m shooting San Francisco and it’s perfect because this city is already performing this high wire act between the sublime and the ridiculous. I know where the light cuts through fog at 4 PM. I know which alleys echo with footsteps and which ones just swallow sound. The city is my co-conspirator, all those angles, all that vertical ambition crashing into horizontal reality, all of it conspiring to make thes dancers vision hit harder.
The space isn’t just a backdrop in my frame, it’s in conversation with the dancer. The grime argues with the grace. The indifference of passersby becomes part of my composition. A guy walks through my shot and suddenly he’s part of the piece whether he knows it or not.
It’s guerrilla transcendence and I’m the one stealing it, freezing it, making it permanent. It’s beauty as a Molotov cocktail, and I’m lighting the fuse every time I hit record.
Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,
that soft summer morning
round a turning in the path,
the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,
its legs in the air like a woman in need
burning its wedding poisons
like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,
I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,
but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.
I am the vampire of my own heart,
one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter
who can no longer smile.
Am I dead?
I must be dead. Charles Baudelaire
