I’ve written about Jared S. Stratodrive many times, and once reminisced about the time -long ago- when we knew one another rather well. True to form, he modified the hardware of the Olympus D-395 to take the images above and below.
They seem like miniatures, or stills from US Army footage of nuclear blast tests: model towns constructed by GIs in the New Mexican desert to evaluate the effects of ever-more-powerful atomic explosions on ordinary, fragile human communities.
The tree’s leaves seem like an oncoming avalanche of smoke, dust, and debris overtaking the thin wood walls of the homes: in their suggestion of frozen disaster, these images underscore how violently photography can arrest the kinetic.
(Here).
And yet everything seems so delicate when shrouded in this light. I am reminded again of the quality Heineman’s photos have: the aesthetic of something captured, gently removed from the streaming temporality of life, measured and recorded and tagged, then let go again. I imagine, thinking about it now, that photography and scale-models appeal to me because they are comparable: the deliberation excision of a specific moment or set of dimensions and its careful reproduction.
(Here).
J.S.S. has even offered to help you learn how to do this, should you be so inclined; and if you’re not, you shouldn’t waste his time unless you want to wind up in his massive skull collection, the likes of which I’ve seen in exactly one place besides his apartment.
