Story Noº 5 / 151: The Passing of Time

Noº 5/151: The Passing of Time
Collection: Sundays in the Solarium

I met David Byrne —frontman of Talking Heads— on a street in New York a week before everything stopped.

He was unlocking his bike outside the Spring/Break Art Show. We spoke for a minute or two. He said he liked the fair. I mentioned Superfine—the art fair I co-founded. He said he wanted to come.

Some encounters have the shape of something that might continue.

This one almost did.

Then COVID arrived, and whatever that moment was supposed to become never happened.

That’s the problem with timing. It just closes the door.

Two years later, in Mexico City, I attended Salón Acme —another art fair—, and fell in love with the building. I decided a photograph belonged there.

The sketch is tied to one of Byrne’s songs, This Must Be the Place.

Home is where I want to be. But I guess I’m already there.

A winged man passing at a distance. A space lived long enough to forget it was ever designed. Not a perfect building. A believable one. Like the song.

You think you’re heading somewhere.
You get there.
Then realize you never left.

I sketched it in 2022. I asked to shoot there. They said yes. Then no. Then nothing—which is a more efficient way of saying no. So I tried to replace it.

Other buildings. Other cities. Variations on the same language—balconies, courtyards, plants that had grown without permission. Places that looked correct but felt wrong.

None of them did it for me.

Some ideas aren’t flexible. They’re anchored. Move them and they stop meaning anything.

By then, the photograph had already started to slip.

Time does that. Just enough to make you question whether something was worth holding onto in the first place.

Three years passed.

Somewhere in the middle of that, I saw Augusto —the model— perform in Cabaret Mexico City.

He was playing Clifford Bradshaw—the protagonist. The one who watches everything instead of trying to control it.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I recognized it later. He was exactly what the photograph needed: short, muscular, graceful.

When we finally shot the image, I noticed a small tattoo on his arm. A bee. He told me he used to be a beekeeper.

I’d been carrying a real wasp, dried, in a small box for four years, since the original sketch, waiting for the right man to stitch its wings onto. Wasps are sexy bees, right? No, not really—although they are closely related.

The wasp wings weren’t waiting for him.
I was.

We shot the photograph where it was always meant to be shot.

The image is simple.

A winged man passing at a distance. The space feels like it belongs to someone, though you’re not invited in.

You’re not meant to enter the frame.

You’re meant to recognize it.

Time doesn’t feel like it’s passing. It feels stalled. Suspended. As if nothing urgent has ever happened in that space, and nothing particularly urgent ever will.

Four years between idea and execution.

Four years for something to begin.
It already had.

The photograph is called The Passing of Time.
The song insists I’m there already.

If this was worth your time, pass it on.

This work will become a book.
Photographs and field notes by James Miille
Words by Jona Montoya