Slouching Towards Monochrome
Take a walk down any downtown street or laneway. The whole fuckin’ mess is covered in layers of paint, scratches and scrawls, ripped posters, advertising billboards, words and images - all screaming out for our attention. Lost dogs. Buy this. Fly here. Eat shit. It used to be so simple. KILROY WAS HERE. We live in contemporary Babylon and we are all speaking in tongues. It’s a wonder that anybody can communicate with anybody else. Yet, we do, or at least we think so.
I have always enjoyed the chaos and randomness of city streets. I love the noise, the traffic, people walking in all directions, people begging, old guys smoking and swearing at passerby, intimate conversations and now, walking phone calls. It’s a cacophony and it reminds me of jazz. As Miles Davis once pronounced “There’s no such thing as a wrong note”.
Slouching Towards Bethleham was Joan Didion’s acclaimed book of essays portraying the San Francisco cultural revolution of the 1960s. It was a time when the world, as she understood it, no longer made sense to her. “If it was to work again at all,” she said “it would be necessary to come to terms with disorder”.
Once again, the world is not making sense. Slouching Towards Monochrome is my coming to terms with disorder. Political chaos and personal disintegration. My hope is that this work allows the beauty and ugliness, the rage, the anger, the calm, the sadness and joy speak through me, my camera and my photographs.
Lorne Fromer
