FOTOSEPTIEMBRE USA 2018 Exhibition Documentation
Proof Of Life 
Byrd Williams IV
REM Gallery 

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From pictorialism to postmodernism; from nitrate film to cell phone image files.

I am a fourth generation photographer in Texas and have recently disseminated my family’s 125-year archive to five different state, national and international institutions. The collection is made up of photographs, cameras artifacts, letters and diaries from four Byrd’s and will be predominantly housed by University of North Texas Special Collections. Smaller editions of photographs from all generations with smaller editions going to Museum of Fine Arts Houston, University of Texas Arlington, University of Texas Austin-Harry Ransom Center, Briscoe Center for American History, Stadtmuseum Simeonstift Trier of Trier Germany, and Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral in Bad Ems Germany.

My work has one toe in archaeology, one toe in anthropology and one toe in ART. Archeologists have discovered similar records in the form of clay tablets going back to the 2nd millennium BC. Many crucial fragments and clues have been lost because of the natural disinterest in one’s own foot prints. This type of artifact inventory is the only evidence posterity can possess on what is was to be sentient in our time. You can never fully get inside the mind of a deceased culture without this communication between the living and the dead. To be sure, this is my religion, my PROOF of life.

We owe an explanation to all unborn people. Why did we do these things? What did we look like? What do we hold dear? In this spirit, posterity can make value judgments about our successes and failures and we will not have lived for nothing.

There is no past or future, they are merely thoughts that arise in the present. The act of photographing seems to me to be a rather pathetic attempt to put memories and anticipated future event into sticks and stones. We want to solidify the present in a way that makes the numinous appear real. It is silly if you think about it and to reduce the embarrassment of squandering time we have named them art and proclaim their value as cultural markers.

Going through a room of one’s life work is to consort with the dead. Dead people, dead birthdays, dead time. Is it the domain of posterities historians to decide whether the records that we all make of our living years holds informational or artistic value enough to assign it to evidence status rather than the trash heap.

Photographs are proof of now.

Byrd Williams IV