“The shadow of a passing cloud drags over railroad tracks in Minnesota,” by Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings.
“Angelic Melancholic, 2008,” ibid.
“`Umikûmâlima,” ibid.
Looking at Heineman’s photographs affects me in a peculiar way that recalls the pitched sense of longing I felt seeing my grandfather’s old model train set, with its European hills and forlorn, precisely-painted trees, and the German buildings of an architecture at once archetypal and unfamiliar to me.
Miniaturization, and I would include such phenomena as tilt-shift photography and Heineman’s beautiful loops*, provokes an irresolvable sort of longing in us that is familiar from aging: by reducing the scale of the world, we can envelop its structures and forms completely, bringing buildings into ourselves, holding trees in hand and running our fingers over the smooth hills. We can at last examine the details in which we’ve hidden so much youthful meaning, the spaces into which we crammed our childhoods, while holding cities still and at arm’s length.
At the same time, minituratization excludes us forever from these spaces. We cannot enter the train station and run between its delicate columns and benches, and we can no longer climb into the tree and consider it our castle. The hills are papier-mâché or plaster, and will break beneath us. Perhaps the world was too vast when we were young, but now it is too small.
Growing larger means we nervously and clumsily handle these fragile artifacts, while when little we bounced between them with abandon; we sink into the cushions which were once our forts; we have in hand the whole tiny world and can at last bring it fully into mind, but we lumber like plump monsters across shrunken fields -how could we have thought them so vast?-, and looking at the marvel in our palm -the scale model of something that we might have entered only decades before- we feel at once expansive and banished, encompassing and forbidden (while perhaps inside, childhood continues without us).
It sometimes seems to me that Heineman can return at will to those spaces and stride into the model train stations or onto the tops of little skyscrapers, staying long enough at least to send us photographs we recognize: that’s what our world looked like before we reduced it irretrievably:
“Only Minutes from a Dream,” ibid.
*Note from above: speed and repetition are associated with size for reasons worth contemplating.
