ACCOZZAGLIA

Senility, originally uploaded by ageing accozzaglia

Might as well get this series started.

This photo was part of a “Thanksgiving” weekend shoot yielding a number of surprisingly memorable shots. Only recently did most of these get scanned, so to have everything on screen from my past work, along with more recent stuff, is akin to a personal re-discovery. Seeing everything in one place for the first time ever is kinda nifty.

This photo, Senility, was one of my favourites from that series. The abandoned car was missing pretty much all its mechanical parts, and not knowing much about old American cars, I wasn’t sure what company manufactured it. Its stripped character, its oxidation, and the sense of abandonment embody how I suspect senility must feel: everything at once vaguely reminiscent of something once familiar, but anything to bring that echo to a clarion call now is fairly hard to do, the toll of time and age and wear having run its irreversible course.

A memory I ascribe to senility and dementia dates back to about grade two or so. One day, on a rainy, warm, humid afternoon just after school ended, I remember being driven home. As we turned the corner to my street, a very old woman (probably in her eighties) was standing there with nearby neighbours. She was looking very lost and not entirely with it, putting it mildly. I asked my mother what was going on, and her response was a bit deceptive: “She’s senile, and she doesn’t know she’s even here.” That never made a lot of sense to me (very little of what my mother said made any sense). Even though this woman was harmless, the very idea that a woman in her own neighbourhood didn’t even know she was in her own neighbourhood — on a gloomy, rainy afternoon which added to the eerie atmosphere — really scared the little me. Was it really possible to be lost in one’s own surroundings? In a big sense, yes, but it’s far more complicated than that: it was clear she was aware that she was somewhere, but beyond that, there was no usable context for her. Eventually, a paramedic came and took her to hospital, I guess. In her compromised state, much of her memory and context was robbed by cerebral deterioration.

Senility, along with a bulk of that weekend’s finds, was shot on one of my favourite film emulsions, Fujichrome Multispeed MS 100/1000 (film code: RMS). It was quite a versatile colour reversal film, and I still shoot frozen, albeit expired rolls of it, despite its 2001 discontinuation.

Senility happened just south of Jordan, Minnesota.