but i digress
Photozine, Issue #2, Nestor Kok, 1 pg, behance.net/nestorkok
Why does the colour blue feel like remembering? but i digress floats a mystery to you in a sea of blue fragments. The square pieces are of a photo of the author standing in front of Chicago’s infamous Bean in Millennium Park. Kok tries to piece together a memory with these disembodied details. But it’s complicated.
but i digress is a one-page zine and on its inside folio the colour photo is printed in full. As you work through digress, the full photograph calls you like a dare. You can peek in the folds, catch larger glimpses of the scene. You have to decide, will I follow Kok’s storyline into reverie, or should I just look at it quickly now? Which version of the moment is more accurate? It’s tempting to think that the full photograph will give you the whole picture.
I like the way the Bean itself bends and warps our perception of the world. The people reflected in it in Kok’s photo are distorted, and that’s part of the joy of looking into the Bean. It reminds me just how frail and mutable our memories are. Our perspective on a past event can change over time given someone else’s account or our desires creeping in. But photographs? They are a more stable glimpse of the past seen through the static perspective of the camera. Though, but i digress illustrates that perspective is misleading. Kok remembers bird shit on the sculpture that the camera couldn’t pick up and the bright, unrelenting summer heat that afternoon. The camera can be as forgiving as we often think of it as objective, bald, even cruel.