Honor the Ghosts by Evans Vestal Ward

Issue 180

I moved to New York City in 1995 after college. After one year there, a friend gifted me a little book. It was a Dover Press publication of Berenice Abbott images, New York in the 30s’. This was before the internet and cell phones, so I decided, ‘I’m gonna go find these places’. It was kinda like a hunt and the only camera I had at the time was a 110 camera. The image negatives are the size of a raisin.

So I started photographing the locations, noticing what was missing, what was changed, what was the same and then it evolved to include me photographing places in my personal life.

The framing of the images comes from the format of the camera. The Pentax 110 was the only 110 camera that actually had interchangeable lenses which, for a spy camera, was pretty great. Years later, when looking closely at the negative scans, content extended through the standard edges of the frame and into the margins. Including that omitted information is important.

I was doing all these images between 1996 up into the year 2000 which is approximately 50 years after Berenice’s work was done. Then over the decades I’ve tried to print images, see how they work, play with sequencing and it wasn't really working but I knew there was something in these photographs. I just didn't have the language for it yet.

And about three years ago my partner suddenly died and it really allowed me to understand loss in a substantial way. The subtle ways as well as the big ones.

There is, oh you've lost your parents, which you expect, but then there’s the ambiguous losses, which is a really lovely cradling term. Things you realize your body misses and your mind misses. It's very Pavlovian.

Looking back on these images I realize I was a little gay kid coming from North Carolina, from the middle of nowhere, growing up in the AIDS scare and not living my full life. Then moving to this place, New York, the promise land.

And those places and that culture was missing when I got there. A lot of it, gone.

Coming from the south, suburbia, I grew up in a house that was built five years before I was born. The new was always more shiny than the past. Living in Providence Rhode Island for college, that history is on every corner in new England, those colonial new England ghost stories were a basis for America. You can touch the past on the streets of Providence.

The ghosts of those spaces, even rungs on the stairs worn down. There were people there before us.

And I think there was that connection to a lot of those spaces I was photographing in New York. That is what I connected with when I looked at these images years later when I understood deeper what that void means.

So that is this project.

These images are also about the hidden side of Berenice Abbott. Abbott was female and lesbian making a living as a photographer. Stieglitz’s boys club and the culture of the 1930’s didn’t jive with that. Then there is her history as a photographer in Paris? She had to cleve all that and her personal life from her work to survive. This resonance of loss is in her work as well. She had to hide so much.

That is what this project is also about.

Evans Vestal Ward lives and works in Los Angeles.
www.evansvestal.com | @evansvestalward