This photograph doesn’t lie because it can’t. I’m alone with the weight of being the only consciousness that matters, if consciousness matters at all, drinking wine where Romans probably did the same stupid gorgeous thing. This is vineyard solipsism at it’s finest… the afternoon bleeds gold and I’m stealing it, one sip at a time, like all beautiful moments are theft from the void.
Part of me suspects that I’m a loser
and the other part of me thinks I’m God Almighty.
John Lennon
France gives you permission to be exactly this pretentious, this melancholy, this aware of yourself being aware. I’m not just drinking, I’m performing the act of drinking for an audience of one, which is either the purest or most pathetic thing a person can do. Maybe both. Lennon knew the hustle. So do I, apparently.
These grapes became wine became my temporary escape from the prison of my own skull. And I documented it. Because if a man drinks alone in a vineyard and doesn’t photograph it, does he exist? Does anyone?
Provence doesn’t answer. It just keeps making wine, keeps turning sunlight into stupor, keeps offering these small sacraments to everyone convinced they’re the first to feel this way. I wasn’t. But that bottle was mine. That light was mine. That particular configuration of loneliness was mine alone.