Noº 19/151: I Won’t Stay Very Long
Collection: Above the Tree Line
There’s nothing quite like another medical scare to take the romance out of pumping iron.
One minute I’m at the gym, feeling strong and thinking about this week’s newsletter. The next, I’m lying flat with my pants down and gel on my groin, watching an ultrasound screen. The verdict: a hernia. One centimeter. No need for surgery. I pulled my pants up and went back to being an artist.
For I Won’t Stay Very Long, I asked Mario to throw sheets of paper into the air. The photograph grew out of Sufjan Stevens’s “Futile Devices”—that tenderness of having so much affection for someone and so little ability to say it. I wanted to give that feeling a physical form: fragments of a person or an experience, close enough to recognize, moving too quickly to hold.
I placed Mario against a photograph I’d made a few years ago while driving through Northern California after a forest fire. I’d kept that photograph without knowing what I would do with it. Working on this image, I recognized the atmosphere. Sometimes remembering someone feels warm. Sometimes it makes the air difficult to breathe.
I wanted the papers to have a warmth you could almost feel on your skin, even with the smoke behind them. I wanted a softer yellow than the smoke. Jonquil: soft, buttery, almost exactly the color I’d imagined in the sketch.
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
