ED HECKERMAN
THE FLOATING FIRE (a selection)
String Of Lights
Manhattan Beach, 1999
THE FLOATING FIRE uses image and text in an equal measure. The text does not "anchor" the photographs, as does a caption telling the viewer what to look at and how to look at it, nor does it "relay" a narrative absent from the images, like the obvious way cartoon speech balloons do. The text does not explain the images, nor do the pictures "illustrate" the text, but rather together they play and mingle in the generation of a third meaning.

In the process of working on this piece I wrote many autobiographical stories originally intended to accompany the pictures, all of which I abandoned in favor of an open reading of fewer words, wherein the viewer / reader is invited to imagine the ephemeral visual epiphanies and reveries of an American expatriate displaced in Switzerland, who then returns to America. The photos were taken from 1996 to the end of 1999. The free verse was written piecemeal between 1995 and 2001. After experimenting with many possible forms the words and images were sequenced into a Quicktime slide show featuring music by John Roevekamp. This web page and it's attendant links are another attempt to string together some of the more memorable lights of THE FLOATING FIRE.

THE FLOATING FIRE is both a "celebration of light" as William Carlos Williams put it, and the quiet "praise of shadows" favored by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. For lack of a better word is aspires to be a sort of photopoetics involving light and its absence in equal measure to matter and space. It embraces a non-discursive wonderment of ordinary details and acknowledges the lucent emptiness which makes change possible.
Plastic Cupid
Retreat Hut Doorway
Candle Tray In Morning Frost
Compost
Wet Gutter In Appenzell
No Passing Basel Art Fair
Swiss Cobblestones
Dry Buoys
Go Rubylith and Mini Blinds
Shower Button
Leaf, Line, and Gutter