This is not a review. I’m not a critic. I’m a photographer who is writing about a photobook by Charlie Simokaitis called The Crisis Tapes (TIS, 2024). The poet Robert Duncan used to say that responsibility is the ability to respond, and that’s what I’m hoping to do here.
The first photograph in the book is of Charlie’s daughter Faye. I know this because Charlie was my friend in the first cohort of the Hartford MFA program, and I watched this work grow from it’s infancy. Charlie’s daughter Faye was gradually losing her eyesight while Charlie was making these photographs, and this situation was the genesis of the book. Her presence for us the viewers fades almost immediately as the book progresses, but not, I imagine, for Charlie.
The second photograph is of sand, in which we see a triangulation of the footprints of a multi-toed small creature and the slithering tracks of a Sidewinder, a desert rattlesnake I know about from old western movies. The uncertainty of what happened in this sand is unnerving, which is true of many of the photos in the book. What are we seeing? Exactly.
We are seeing the things which Charlie looks for, sometimes scenes of nature, sometimes dark corners of possibly a basement ceiling, sometimes a building, sometimes an incomprehensible detail of a wall with two holes, one of which is crossed by a saw blade, sometimes a blind dog. Many of the photos are quite dark, and almost all of them are mysterious.
As mysterious, perhaps, as losing one’s sight. Or as having sight and finding oneself seeing these dislocated fragments of a real world that is no longer real because now it’s a photograph. A Charlie Simokaitis photograph, which I think of as being just as distinctive as a paragraph from a novel by Samuel Beckett (who I happen to know Charlie has read). And I think this is where I take my delights from this book—in seeing so many Charlie images. They are sometimes nearly abstract. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, extract—detailed extractions from the context of the world.
The Crisis Tapes feels very much like a celebration of seeing something that doesn’t really exist until it’s photographed. The shattered moon, which might be a way-too symmetrical galaxy, or possibly the broken ice from a bird bath lying on the night grass. Flash is an important part of this seeing at times, as is night, and shadow. I use the word celebration because this is not a gloomy book, despite it’s impetus. I don’t know if he’s seeing on behalf of Faye, who soon won’t be able to, or if he’s seeing sympathetically with her, as the darkening occurs. Perhaps it’s both.
Page after page delivers another extracted image, sometimes clumped thematically, and sometimes a complete surprise, with no comforting narrative structure or set subject matter to ease the uncertainty, the strangeness, the unpredictability. Almost all of these are photographs I’d want on my wall so I could study them over time and live with their presences.
The final image, bookending the first image, is Faye again, this time diving down into the water of a swimming pool with her legs kicking back and up toward the camera. It’s a photograph filled with the bright light of summer sun on water and an exuberance that signals for me, personally, just how joyous it can be to be alive, even though.
I think looking at The Crisis Tapes as being a book about something is a mistake. It’s not an “account” of anything, no matter what the publisher’s blurb says. It is about a lot of things that do not need one thematic thread unifying them. My sense is, it’s more dedicated to Faye than it is about her. It also feels like a long engagement with vision and uncertainty by a father who is coming to terms with his daughter’s approaching loss. Meanwhile, he’s doing what he does in his own particular way, which is to see.