#fotoseptiimbre #safoto #stateoftheart #peterbrownleighton #hindsight #covid #berniesanderssocialists #piginagasstation #photography #humanity #polity #sanantonio #texashillcountry #texas

HINDSIGHT [is 2020]
Peter Brown Leighton

So, one day, in the early spring of 2020, I went to our local HEB grocery store which had just mandated mask wearing, social distancing, and had also begun limiting the numbers of patrons allowed in at any one time. This happened a few days after our president had mentioned in a meeting with the press that one day the COVID virus would just disappear from our shores, this even as the rates of infection and deaths associated with the virus were beginning to dramatically climb around the country.

On that day, as I stood in line outside the grocery, wearing a mask, my feet centered on a socially distanced square along with several others in front of and behind me, each of us with six feet separating us from the rest, a tall, lanky, 60 something, custom-booted rancher, exited the store sans mask. He stopped a few yards outside the entrance and turned looking at those of us waiting to get in with disdain, shaking his head. “Well, just look at you bunch of Bernie Sanders socialists standing around out here…like sheep. Aren’t you a sight.” And, then, before anyone so much as had time to draw forth their lawfully concealed weapons, he turned and strode off into the sunset.

Later that evening, I began the series HINDSIGHT [is 2020] simply as a way to journal about how absurdly helpless, unarmed, and frustrated I had felt in that moment.

The resulting images from the series evolved haphazardly, almost like sketches. I would return to them on and off over the next several months as my news feeds were constant in their reporting of the virus’s financial, political, and cultural consequences.

At one point, I discovered that, throughout China, authorities were deploying hundreds of thousands of exaggerated fear-based posters and banners in their towns and cities to, among other things, encourage mask wearing and social distancing. Consequently, I began tagging my images with these same types of slogans, some in English, others in Chinese, slogans I’d either appropriated or manufactured from whole cloth, imagining myself to be a kind of renegade propagandist and crowd control specialist – a Frankensteinian bureaucrat run amuck.

Given this quality of mind, I was intending the images themselves to be like fever dreams unfolding in a Jungian tower of Babel, their text to be neither artful or even intelligible – and neither of which to be held to any higher standard than the factually inaccurate, malapropic comments which spewed almost daily from the man elected to the highest office in the land in 2016 and ultimately defeated in 2020. 

That said, now several years later, the populace of my little town has succeeded in compartmentalizing their pandemic traumas, regarding the pandemic itself as if it had never happened. If not from our shores, then, COVID has disappeared from our minds, in order, it seems, to make more psychological room for the next round of existential challenges headed our way.

Collectively, as a nation, we can and could’ve done better. The pandemic should have united us as a country, but instead it has divided us even more. It should have elevated our humanity and showcased the ethical and moral values the best of humankind has nourished and cherished over the millennia, rather than only exposing the intractable flaws about which we aren’t much given to examine or improve. 

Plague, climate change, economies teetering on the verge of collapse, civil unrest, migrating outcast populations, failing institutions, the ever increasing potential for nuclear conflict.

Given this atmosphere, societies across the globe have become stratified and frozen in place, their citizens, like distracted automatons, bedeviled by recursive loops of disruption and –existing not in stasis so much as nervously twitching between ever quickening states of stimulus and response, between the ledge and the leap…

But, as they say, I digress.

Let us put pontifications about the future aside now and take a turn down memory lane instead. Consider, for example, the first two prints in the HINDSIGHT series. 

The first is “Happy New Year” which in its own way speaks for itself. As 2020 dawned, some of us were just becoming aware of the COVID virus, a looming black swan, baring a full set of sharpened teeth. “Happy New Year” is a composite, then, of several found analog snapshots digitally stitched together (by hand) to fashion a contradiction, one composed of a New Year’s celebration coupled with impending catastrophe.

The second image, tagged in Chinese, reads, “Where did it come from? Nobody knows.” 

The background photograph for this image, paired with another found snapshot, is one I captured in the 1980’s, on a business trip on my way to Corpus Christi from San Antonio. Midway, I had pulled into a service station to refuel. As I approached the pumps, I noticed a pig, presumably asleep, reclining against a curb there. After taking its picture, and while paying the attendant for my gas, I asked about the pig’s origins. The attendant shrugged and told me it had just appeared out of nowhere, and he didn’t know who it belonged to. We were in Texas after all. Strange things, he said, tended to happen here. Leave the pig alone long enough, he concluded, and it would just up and disappear.

All Copyrights Peter Brown Leighton 

•••