Tagged — Jamie Lyons
I've been stalking these ruins, these photogenic apocalypses, with the devotion of someone who knows the official story is horseshit but can't quite articulate why. The National Parks are supposed to be our temples of authenticity, right? Our cathedrals of unspoiled wilderness where we commune with some imaginary pre-industrial purity. But I walk into Fort Point under the Golden Gate and I'm confronted with Civil War reenactors performing nostalgia for a war that never touched this coast, or surfers carving arcs beneath the bridge while tourists photograph "nature." I get it: these spaces are theater, spectacular lies we've all agreed to believe because the alternative is admitting there's no outside anymore, no escape hatch from the machine. The Sutro Baths, Marin Headlands, Hyde Street Pier: I document them like crime scenes, beautiful and complicit, where we perform our little rituals of authenticity while the infrastructure crumbles into something simultaneously more honest and more fake. The Parks Service curates our manufactured wildness while we Instagram our souls back into submission. I just keep shooting, cataloging the gorgeous rot, the rehearsals and reenactments, the desperate attempts to stage meaning in spaces that were already stages before we got there.
Speculation 2018
Sutro Baths broken 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 Sophocles Phaedra belongs here. Sophocles understood something we keep […]
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Engineering 2017
John Warren Travis’ Design for Oedipus Rag There’s something absolutely primal, something that cuts through all the academic horseshit, about staging Sophocles in a chapel at Fort Mason. I’ve seen Greek tragedy done in every godforsaken venue from The Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus to prosceniums that smell like 1950s cigarettes to black box theaters where […]
ReadIndividualism 2016
Betty Reid Soskin at ninety-four, ninety-four, standing there receiving an award named after Carey McWilliams, and the only thing more beautiful than the image is knowing she didn’t wait for permission to make history happen. She made it happen, hustled it into existence, because that’s what you do when the official story is a lie […]
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Adventure 2015
But surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around. William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life Look at that […]
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Industries 2015
inkBoat 95 Rituals for Anna Halprin a Site Specific Dance performance at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park Just as the ancients danced to call upon the spirits in nature, we too can dance to find the spirits within ourselves that have been long buried and forgotten. Anna Halprin
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The City 2015
Civil War Reenactors at Fort Point Here’s the thing about these dudes buttoning themselves into wool and brass at Fort Point: they’re chasing something that never existed in the first place. The contact sheet doesn’t lie the way memory does; every frame captures another angle of the same desperate authenticity, the same hunger to touch […]
ReadThe City 2014
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw its patches down upon me also, The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be […]
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Wanderlust 2014
Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me, Whispering, I love you, before long I die, I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you, For I could not die till I once look’d on you, For I fear’d I might afterward lose you. Now […]
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Speculation 2014
We Players Lear Rehearsal at Battery Wallace in the Marin Headlands Doth any here know me? This is not Lear: Doth Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, his discernings Are lethargied–Ha! waking? ’tis not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am? Shakespeare, King Lear, […]
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Industries 2014
You’ve got these three women, Dread, Horror, and Alarm, the Graeae, those primordial hags who share one fucking eye between them, and they’re not tucked away in some theater where the already converted file in with their tote bags and good intentions. No. They’re at Aquatic Park, which if you know anything about San Francisco, […]
ReadAdventure 2014
There is something about being small, genuinely, cosmically small, underneath that orange monument to human hubris, surfing Fort Point, while the Pacific tries its damnedest to kill me. The water’s so cold it feels personal, like it has a grudge. My body’s screaming at me that this is a terrible idea, and you know what? […]
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Industries 2013
They asked me to document a site specific performance piece called Out of Water at Fort Funston for the Performance Studies international conference. Fort Funston… where the cliffs give up and the Pacific takes over. Helen Paris and Caroline Wright had assembled the whole apparatus: commissioned sound scores, UK sopranos, singers and swimmers spread across […]
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