from the intro to the zine:
this project is a passage through packed-away documents: memories from a year in which I graduated high school and began my first semester of college. photos of friends and teenage life crowd the frames, but in stray shots, in the margins and in the backdrops, the face of a country bears an uncanny expression.
in taking a closer look at the thousands of digital photos i had taken this year, a broader picture began to emerge: i was reminded of a rattled country, post-9/11, stuck in a war begun under false pretenses, banking its future on a new presidential election.
ultimately i realized the best course in assembling this work was to bring these two phenomena – that of my teenage self suddenly dislocated and that of a country fumbling for normalcy – into the same (sometimes tense) space.
while maintaining the consistency of a few familiar faces throughout, and employing something resembling a personal narrative of time, i've tried to situate these documents in a larger narrative of a nation in 2004, reading the collection as the attentiveness of a teenage mind grappling with sense in a roughly unfamiliar moment.
andrew piccone
may 2020