Tim Soter… blog.

Witkin, my longtime animal familiar left the Earth yesterday at 5:41pm.  Named after photographer Joel-Peter Witkin (see previous post) she had been with me for seventeen years, lived in six different apartments and gentrified Williamsburg before any of the Facebook generation, arriving in 1994 when Planet Thailand and the L Cafe were the only things going.  She has been the subject of a portrait commissioned on a shower curtain and she and I have even seen a ghost together, an honest to god moving spirit.  I’ll tell you that story in person.

When my friend Nadia and I, fresh out of amish country, had moved to Brooklyn Witkin had escaped as we were unpacking.  She was lost for four days as fireworks were going off; we were both so sad for her being alone in the big city with only three legs to fend off attackers and stitches still in her belly from a recent spaying.  Nadia and I would get calls in the middle of the night from helpful neighbors who had read our pitiful sign (SEE BELOW) and thought they caught a glimpse.  But it was never her.  On the fourth day the residents on the first floor of our building called us down to the basement, I called Witty’s name and she came out from behind a boiler quite chatty and happy to be back with us.

She remained in excellent health until last year when I was called last minute to do a photo assignment in Syria.  The day before I was leaving she became very ill and close friends had to step in and take her to the vet while I was away, emailing me health updates.  I was sure that she would die while I was away or would need to be put down when I returned, the situation did not look good.  On a day off I visited an old Syrian ruin, a burial temple in Palmyra and climbed down into a tomb. I placed the Polaroid of her that I always traveled with deep inside and I can guarantee that it will remain there, untouched for a long, long time.  See it here.

When I returned from the trip however, she perked up after some rehabilitation and fluids and lasted another year, being the sole ear to my rants about bad television or punchlines that needed to be heard (if only by a cat.)  Very recently her health had declined and this week is became clear that she needed to move on.  She of course will be missed tremendously.

As Vonnegut wrote: “So it goes.”

I shot the above photograph maybe a year ago near the garment district in Manhattan.  The camera misfocused, but I really enjoyed the photo so when I was near the same street months later, I revisited the elephant and made another photo.  Different light but now the elephant was being used as a coat rack.  Months after that I was in the area and revisited him to find his feet had been bound with gray duct tape.

I really enjoy the slow dialog that I’m having with this elephant statue.  Joel-Peter Witkin, in a one day seminar I took years ago at ICP used the phrase (for the first time to my young ears.)  He ‘had a dialog’ with a headless corpse, a naked, bloated man wearing only black socks.  He claimed he had to remove the subjects head (I believe with a tool similar to bolt cutters) in order to legally preserve the man’s identity.  Then he was left with a headless body, a seated mass that kept falling over while he was positioning it.  In the lecture he pointed to the finished photograph – the pose that he and the subject had both “arrived at” was the only one in which the subject would stay put.  He referred to this part of the process as “the dialog” that he and his subject had.  He said this in a very genuine way and with less theatrics than you would expect.  That phrasing really stuck with me.

These photos are presented in the sequence in which they were shot.