“Phenomenology Study 2, Ted, Gau, Terry, Mike, and Bruce”

2005
digital c-print mounted on aluminum
20” x 30 1/2”

This project involves two photographs, one from the early eighties that I took, and the other is not known exactly but assumed from the mid-eighties taken by Terry Newsom. The color photograph of the high School kids dancing was sent to me in 2005 from someone that I used to work with at Safeway in Austin TX, from the early 1980’s, when I was a grad student at UT. Terry Newsom became a DJ after I sold him my pair of loudspeakers in 1983 when I moved to NY. The photograph is of high school kids dancing to his DJ set emitted through my old speakers. The other image is a photograph that I took of the night stocking crew taking a break in the early morning night shift from 1981. Terry is the one with the cap on and playing a video game. When I received the photo from Newsom in 2005, after not hearing from him for 22 years, I was struck by the fact that he had been a DJ at a high School, and that he had sent me this image. The two interior spaces were connected in my mind, the space of the store and the space of the dance, both represented different aspects of spectacle. I felt as if I was threaded through both images and superimposed. The two photographs seem sad, and melancholic, the young adult worker in the grocery store, and the young kids dancing, in how they both represented potential for failure and disappointment.