The following pages are a segment of a project I did for Rick Jarow’s “Dreams, Myths and Visions” course last semester (Spring 2014). The project began as a process of mourning the great oak tree that once stood atop Graduation Hill, gnarled and immense, which the College had chopped down without any warning. Jarred by the sudden loss, I decided I must commemorate the tree in some way. Gradually, however, as I began to photograph the stump—the only piece of the oak that remained—I realized that the killing of the tree was only one piece in a much larger landscape of death. I began to see death wherever I went: a dead squirrel on the way to class, a deer leg hanging from a branch out at the farm. Camera in hand, I chronicled Vassar’s underworld, following the murky trail of decay wherever it led.
In the meantime, I was also delving into the rich landscape of Romantic poetry, largely thanks to a class with Ron Sharp. Slowly, as I read poems and wandered campus, I uncovered the intertwined worlds of death, sleep, and dreaming. I matched the photographs I took with excerpts of the work of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats that seemed to pierce those hidden realms of horror and mystery.
The journey into the underworld colored the last few weeks of my junior year, steeping me in a kind of ethereal darkness. I wound up discovering an abandoned dump at the Vassar farm, replete with fire hydrants, piles of stone, and dozens of the wooden benches that are scattered throughout campus, all left to rot. I had found Vassar’s underbelly, and then I plunged onward. The skeleton of a deer in the woods. An old stone piping system in a hidden enclave on the farm. Shopping carts, reams of paper, surgical masks, piles of books, broken windows, forgotten elevator shafts, and wheelbarrows in the basement of Main. A devil’s face, surrounded by infernal symbols. I had found the space of the insane, the neglected, the abandoned and forgotten.
My journey ultimately resulted in a 111-page photo essay. What follows is a small section from that larger work.
