To Record Only Water for Ten Days (2018)

The title comes from John Frusciante's 2001 album, made after several years in which the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist had all but disappeared into heroin and cocaine use, and nearly didn't survive it. The album he made coming out the other side doesn't sound like a comeback record. It sounds like someone still partway through the process, working it out in real time rather than looking back at it from safety. The sixteen songs move between giving up and something like hope, sometimes within the same track. There's a kind of naivety to it, almost childlike in places, that sits oddly next to how bleak the subject matter is. It's not really a record about defeating depression. It's closer to a record about what it takes to open up again after years spent closing off, the risk of letting anyone back in after that much isolation. This series moves through the same territory in photographs, following the actual places tied to that period. Studios where the music was made under conditions that would concern anyone. Spots where drugs were used, sometimes as escape, sometimes closer to something more final. Places where the line between those two things got thin enough to stop mattering. The images move between Hollywood and the desert around Zzyzx, tracking a kind of geography that runs from excess to emptiness and back. Some were shot outside the Viper Room, where people died while music played on the other side of the wall. Others sit in the desert itself, which holds a kind of ambiguity that felt right for this: it can read as refuge or as exile, depending on what you bring to it. None of this is meant to make addiction look interesting. The gap between the myth of the artist who suffers for the work and what that suffering actually costs, in real losses, real people, is one of the things the series is trying to sit inside of rather than resolve. There's a second half to it too, quieter and harder to photograph: what it looks like to come back from that. Learning to feel something again after a long stretch of not feeling much of anything. Trusting your own body again after it's been the site of that much damage. The pictures that trace this part are less about drama and more about attention, the kind of noticing that starts to come back once someone is no longer just trying to get through the day. What ties the whole series together is the idea that recovery isn't only something that happens inside a person. It's tied to place. Going back to where things nearly ended and finding that the place itself hasn't stayed the same, or that you haven't. The same studio, the same stretch of desert, can hold both what happened there and what came after.