The Czech poet Ranier Maria Rilke writes in the final lines of Archaic Torso of Apollo, “for here there is no place that does not see you./ You must change your life.” Rilke found in his encounter with a stone sculpture of an ancient god an exchange of ‘seeing’ across time that led to the flash of realization - you must change your life. What could this mean? Rilke seems to suggest that meeting this object, outside of his own time, leads to another function of temporality - a change in life, a change in phase. This moment of phasing through temporality, where seeing leads to being seen, and being seen leads to the possibility of a shift in Being, serves as the central metaphor in my photographic project that borrows its title from Rilke.
These pictures were made simply, as I walked through the southeastern United States, primarily Florida and Georgia. The photographs in this series are observational, describing both their subjects and the photographer suspended in a world permeated by capital, itself a function of time. In staging these encounters with objects and situations, I hope to create a kind of poetic opening - a space for the viewer to find themselves phasing in and out of time, considering their relation to seeing time, and being seen.