100 Days

After Donald Trump unexpectedly prevailed in the 2016 election I started a series of Instagram projects to at least do *something*, even if that something was merely the ineffectual making of art.

My first Instagram project, Transitional Delights, started the next night, was inspired by the poems of Tachibana Akemi, the very model for political frustration when that very frustration cannot be articulated. I composed short poems—tankas—and set them to photographs I made or to found images, doing one each night until the Inauguration.

For this second project, I continued with the basic constraints of the first—it must be started at around 9:00 pm, when the day’s news had “settled down”, and I could spend no more than fifteen minutes executing it. To prepare I had scanned in photographs from a family photo album that a friend who owned an antique store had alerted me to. The basic plan was this: take the day’s major headline and find a photo from the album that illustrated that headline.

You might think that the family photos would in no way correspond to the headlines but they worked very well as illustrations, albeit metaphorical ones.

[See also my blog post on this project at A Bigger Camera and a related post here, as well this one.]