Year 5, Piece Forty-Seven: 47. Black White Blue

Animation as compulsive communication

I took 1296 photos in 2 days across two cities. And then at least 300 more after that. Black White Blue kept showing up, and I kept trying to capture it.

After a while, photo animation becomes compulsive. If you think you might be getting a good shot, you need to snap many times in the same position, not knowing how any of it is going to turn out until you assemble it later. So you keep snapping and snapping, just in case. The images kind of accumulate.

The John Hancock building, once Chicago’s tallest and the second tallest in the world.

I’ve been animating photos for almost 18 years now. Until this project, most of my animations didn’t really see the light of day, though that never stopped me from shooting. I guess I like the control of capturing and manipulating a moving image frame by frame. I like the honesty of the artifice vs. the perceived reality of video. But why I feel compelled to capture images at all is an impulse I don’t quite understand, an impulse that more and more people share as we habituate having a camera on us at all times.

Rather than a desire to capture a particular moment, my impulse to animate begins with already having captured a moment and then wanting to do something with all the raw material. Digital photography and now cloud storage gives us the ability to hoard photos.

Even now, my phone says that I have 95,831 photos on it. Of course, most of these are representations of files that are actually stored in the cloud, going back to 2015. That’s when I stopped removing old photos from my phone. I probably have copies of every other digital photo I’ve taken sitting in hard drives, if I knew where to look. I never delete any of them because they feel like not only art but artifact, a document of my life. 

I don’t delete my photos because I hold on to the idea of one day stringing them all together into one giant stop-motion animation. Every single one. Some version of an entire life flipping by in minutes, and not unlike actual memory, in disjointed snippets. 

I suppose it’s more of a conceptual piece, one that lives as an idea mostly because I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to doing it. The result would certainly not be something anyone would want to watch in its entirety. Would it be stirring and provocative like Tracey Emin’s bed? Or banal, like scrolling through someone’s social media feed?

Being as it is mostly a conceptual work anyway, I actually like the idea of turning anyone’s camera roll into a giant stop-motion. Everyone’s camera roll? I don’t want curated images, I want all of them. Documents and bug bites and half-closed eyes and dick pics and cat memes. I want the gaps of the photos you didn’t take, the moments when you were present enough not to pull out your phone. 

I want the moments where you snapped many photos of the same thing looking to get the perfect shot, and how those moments would turn into moving images. 

A screenshot of less than a week’s worth of photos on my phone’s camera roll.

I don’t think enough can be said about how transformational it is for so many people to carry cameras and computers in their pockets. Creating piles of data and documentation that may stick around for generations, or may flicker out like so much energy. Much ink has been spilled on the subject of course, but I think we are still too close to it to fully comprehend the impact. Even a couple generations ago a photograph was an event, the physical copy a treasure. With all of these piles of photos, how could you even find the signal through the noise? And who would care to look except your own grandchildren?

This week I visited my grandfather at the hospital, aged 97. 

“This is for the birds,” he said, gesturing with his head at the room around him. The room was small with no windows, fluorescent bulbs glaring down on a bed he was stuck in but couldn't quite reach the controls to adjust. Yet it was a quiet, private room during a pandemic. The second time he found himself admitted to the hospital in a week. 

“Getting old isn’t easy,” Grandpa also said, so many tubes pushing fluids into and out of him. I’m sure it isn’t. Most people don’t make it to 97 though, so it’s not an entirely universal experience. And most people who make it to 97 certainly aren’t still co-authoring op-eds from a hospital bed.

Beyond his physical ailments, one of his biggest concerns this week was that somehow the New York Times Magazine had slipped out of his Sunday edition before he had a chance to read it. I was honored to be able to give him my mother-in-law’s copy, driving it from Chicago to Metro Detroit. Passing it from one voracious reader to another, each of them reading multiple newspapers a day. Each of them retired from long careers in law with bodies whose power doesn’t quite match that of their minds, at least at the moment. 

My grandfather was in Room 47. This is my 47th piece for the year and happens to be about number 47, Black White Blue. This is the first time all year that the number of the piece lined up with the number of the color pair. As I navigated the hospital’s parking structures, wings, and hallways, I saw Black White Blue everywhere. In signage, in elevator buttons, and even in my grandfather’s room once I found it.

There was a certain Accidental Renaissance divinity to him in the hospital bed, looking like some Western art historical ideal of god himself all draped in white fabric. The folds of the white pillow radiated out from behind his head, a gauzy white blanket draped across his shoulders inadequately covering his thin arms. His wispy white hair, his white skin, his blue eyes shining.

I wanted to take his picture, but I didn’t want to embarrass him by asking. I’m actually not even sure how he’ll feel about me writing this, because he’ll likely see it. He is a loyal reader of mine, though he admits to me that he understands almost none of it. Come to think of it, he prints it out to read it, which certainly changes at least the animated parts. So maybe this written description of his own image is fitting. 

Black White is about transcendence and culmination, and Blue is communication. With its place so close to the end of the cycle of 49, Black Whtie Blue may be the culmination of a lifetime of study and learning and transmitting, of five newspapers a day and so many other periodicals besides. Black and white print. Black and White and Blue all over.

What I was hoping for this winter was some White all over. A “White Christmas,” I suppose (did you know that song was written by a Jew?). I haven’t seen real snow in years, and hoped that coming to the Midwest in winter we’d finally catch some.

When we were in Chicago for Christmas, not only was there no snow on the ground, but it hasn’t even snowed yet at all this year. I put snow out of my mind, chalking it up to climate change with not only a little bit of grief.

But driving along I-94 on the way to Michigan, we saw little patches of snow by the side of the road. When we finally got out at a rest stop, there was snow on the ground. Grass sticking out of a mass of trampled footprints, but snow. The kids went wild stamping on it in their sneakers. I thought to myself, “this isn’t real snow,” but I restrained myself from sharing my snow snobbery. I was also grateful to see snow, but sort of sad that this was the snow they would get. 

There was a little more snow once we got to my mom’s house, though also not up to my apparently high standards. Still we suited up and went for a walk, sloshing around in my blue rain boots.

Then that afternoon it started snowing in earnest. Like, snow falling from the sky kind of snowing. If it’s been years since I saw snow on the ground, I don’t know how long it’s been since I saw it fall from the sky. It’s magical. I forgot how snow isn’t always individual flakes but often big clumps of them. The kids and I were gleeful, running around with our tongues out. “Snow is a recipe for prettiness,” D said.

What is snow but White Blue, blue water turned frozen white? The sky was also white, blue turned white. And at night and in shadow the white snow itself is blue, trees black silhouetted by the sky. Black White Blue.

I didn’t want the moment of the snow to end. Even when we went inside I sat at the window like an excited dog. I won’t be able to take the snow with me, and the photos are a memory of a thing that happened, not the thing itself. They don’t capture the hush, don’t capture the soft sound that snow makes as it falls on your shoulder. Photos don’t capture the smell either. These are things that perhaps a photo can trigger in your memory, but live only in the moment itself. 

The full spread of 49 cards for Year 5 Rainbow Squared

We are almost to the end of this fifth series of Rainbow Squared. The final piece will be by a guest artist and the colors were determined long ago. This week I only shuffled two cards to determine Piece 47, also determining Piece 48 by default.

So here are all the cards laid out through the end of the series, all 49 in this year’s emergent order. When I took a picture of the full spread, I saw the blue border of the scarf on the black and white foam mat. Black White Blue.

The tarot card I drew this week was The Hermit. A card about yourself in relation to others and going inward. These holidays in the Midwest are not a convenient time to channel The Hermit, when I perhaps desperately want to be alone but find myself stuck inside surrounded by family. How I’d love to be that Hermit sometimes. How lucky I am not to be.

In some ways, this project is how I channel The Hermit, secreting away in corners of my mom’s house with noise-cancelling headphones, communing with my photos and words. The Hermit is also an appropriate card for Black White Blue. If Black White is interconnectedness and transcendence, and Blue is communication, then Black White Blue is about how our communications connect us to each other and the present moment, and how we can transcend them. 

There is a time to embrace the connectivity, to fill your mind with content and even add your own documentation to the pile. There is also a time to turn it off and turn away, turn inward, or even just turn to what’s happening in your immediate surroundings. Being present was hard enough when it was just the moment that was happening. Now there are so many moments happening at once, more than you can fully attend to, more than you can occupy, more than you could ever capture.

Some I have to let float away. 

An active sea otter at the Detroit Zoo.

I make these animations in many ways for myself, each like a tiny snow globe of a moment that I can click on, shaking it and bringing it to life. A way to put a frame around certain moments, by turning them into frames. And just like snow, they are also fleeting. 

The digital is not forever. If I make it to a hospital bed at 97, my grandchildren might not be able to see the animations I’ve made even if they wanted to. Gifs will certainly be an outdated format one day, even if they live on in the blockchain. And these versions are painfully low resolution, aggressively compressed to total less than 10 MB so they can fit in an email.

But this piece, Piece 47, is a moment in time just like any other, as is this moment now that you are reading it. This moment at the end of an old year and the beginning of a new one. All these moments fall like snow, clumping together. Some of it sticking, most of it melting away.