To Record Only Water for Ten Days (2018)
To Record Only Water for Ten Days takes its name from John Frusciante's haunting 2001 album, recorded during his journey back from the edge of self-destruction. The Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist had spent the late '90s lost in a haze of heroin and cocaine, his addiction so severe that he nearly died from an overdose. The album that emerged from his recovery became something rare in popular music: a raw, unfiltered document of what it actually feels like to crawl back from complete collapse.
Frusciante's sixteen songs seem to speak about the relationship with hope, in parallel with the strange relief that comes with giving up completely, and the disorienting process of detaching from reality when it becomes too painful to bear. Yet the album also captures something else—the tentative, almost frightened process of opening up again, of sharing an intensely private journey inward with the outside world. The music is full of what might be called naive contradictions, serving simultaneously as testament to shocking depression and deep loneliness while also standing as a monument to the possibility of victory over these forces.
This photographic series moves through the same emotional territory, flowing meditatively through the mindset that Frusciante documented in sound. The images trace the physical locations where this internal drama played out: the studios where music was recorded in states of altered consciousness, the places where drugs were consumed as both escape and slow suicide, the spaces where the boundaries between life and death became terrifyingly thin. These are the landscapes of addiction and recovery, mapped not through clinical terminology but through the lived experience of someone who survived to tell the story.
The photographs navigate between the hills of Hollywood and the deserts of Zzyzx, following a geography of extremes that mirrors the psychological territory explored in Frusciante's album. They visit the steps of the Viper Room, where friends died while the music played inside, and document the stark beauty of desert spaces that can feel simultaneously like sanctuary and exile. Each location holds traces of the stories that unfolded there, the quiet aftermath of chaos, the strange peace that can follow complete breakdown.
The series captures the paradox at the heart of addiction and recovery: how the same sensitivity that creates art can become the mechanism of self-destruction, and how the journey back from that destruction can itself become a form of creation. Like Frusciante's album, these images refuse to romanticize drug use while still acknowledging the complex relationship between altered states and artistic expression. They document the reality that behind the mythology of the tortured artist lies actual torture, actual loss, actual death.
Yet the photographs also trace the path that leads away from destruction, following the slow process of reconnection with the world that Frusciante's music describes. They examine how someone can learn to feel again after numbness, how to trust again after betrayal by one's own body and mind, how to create again after creativity has been hijacked by addiction. The images capture moments of tentative hope, the fragile beauty that emerges when someone begins to see the world clearly again after years of looking at it through the filter of chemical dependence.
This visual journey through the landscapes of addiction and healing serves as both companion piece to Frusciante's musical document and independent exploration of how place and memory intersect in the aftermath of trauma. The series suggests that recovery is not just an internal process but a geographical one, requiring the courage to revisit the places where you nearly died and find in them something other than destruction. It documents the transformation of locations from sites of self-harm into spaces of reflection, from monuments to loss into markers of survival.
