Central Valley Portraits
by
We are what we breathe. Surrounded by wildfires and combined calamities, our very own breathing is being challenged. Central Valley Portraits is part of this search for communal.
Oxygen. Wild.
Oxygen. Wilder.
• • • •
This eternity is fleeting.
Anger will not help, only forgiveness, only hands, to touch and be touched by. You walk, one step then another,
You get cold, sick, better then broken
You want to forget about the wildfires wildviolcence wildpain
You find a home
You lose
You cry
You cannot control the moment You mourn
You don’t know how to forgive You get lost in war
You can’t go back home
You get angry
You are anger You wound You doubt You long
You fear
You walk
You don’t know how to surrender
You learn how to admit your mistakes
You leave, refuse to hear, escape, and then return
You agree
You ask for forgiveness
You hold cameras not to film but to be, be better, better be
You see
You see
Ana knows that it is not climate change that kills but lack of love
Maria-Helena cannot stop thinking about the future of her lost grandchild
Wendy celebrates her wig (“let me know when I will get famous”)
Jason says that he is here to give – “who are we without giving?”
Hector thanks you for making him cry about his father
Dominique says noting can make her leave this city
Dee Dee believes in unity, coming together, fearless
Near the train stop, someone tells you he is tired of the gunshots and killings in this world And Michael just wants to live
“I don’t care about hope. I just want to live. I just want to live.” This eternity is fleeting.
ABOUT CENTRAL VALLEY PORTRAITS
The times in which we live are times of dismay, anxiety, devastation, countless tragedies, hopelessness, and anger. All around us, beyond and within the U.S., democratic apparatuses are struggling to imagine freedom, throwing up nationalists, bigots, and fascists. How can we survive such mounting waves of suffering and loss? Where do we store and archive our wounds, anxieties, and uncaged dreams? And where can we locate the living archives for renewal and new times?
Over the last year, Yehuda Sharim has observed the grain and pulse of the city of Merced and the Central Valley as it lived, transformed, worked, tensed, ached, changed, and played. He surveyed the streets, bus stops, alleyways, fields, orchards, empty lots, storefronts, backyards, and the people. The sidewalk life and the fields, for him, offer a measured, attentive, and ultimately a generous view of a place and its people as they face compounded calamities. The choreography of the Central Valley, together with its irresistible beauty and brutal neglect, allow contradictions to exist side by side, dance and fly into one another, a cadence that produces disarmingly open images of exceptional power and longevity.
Sharim explores the exteriors of environment and community — scanning the skies for flocks of birds traveling in mass during sunset and encountering strangers who become neighbors. He charts a region, in the midst of a global pandemic, often overlooked as “the other California”; gaps and cracks widening due to loss, everyday precarity, and continued neglect towards its most vulnerable. While listening to his surroundings through photographed images, Sharim navigates personal interior spaces in response to them as well, articulating fragmented thoughts that touch on individual memory, shared grief, and collective hope.
Poetry and photography by Yehuda Sharim; curatorial assistance by Oscar Montero Hernandez; Spanish translation by Alma Alvarado Cabrera
The Valley of SomebodyFor the better future of my family I hope that they will be |
El valle de alguienPara un mejor futuro a mi familia Espero que sean |
The Valley of EscalarsIt is very difficult to accept that you are beneath and then have to climb |
El valle de las escalerasEs muy difícil aceptar que estás debajo y luego tienes que escalar |
The Valley of Patrol officersA piece of land |
El valle de los patrullerosUn pedacito de tierra |
The Valley of FamilyI believe in how I work |
El valle de la familiaCreo en como trabajo |
The Valley of Everything – Take All You WantYou are talking about death |
El valle de todo – Llévate todo lo que quierasEstás hablando de muerte |
The Valley of I just want to liveI really don’t know what to believe in at this point anymore |
El valle de solo quiero vivirRealmente en este momento ya no sé en qué creer |
The Valley of SoonI just take it day by day |
El valle de ahoritaLo tomo día a día |
|
I hear birds and see barbwire |
Escucho aves y miro alambre de espino |
