Christian Catafago

While visiting NYC, I had planned a trip to visit the Niagara Falls, the last waterfalls to be visited of the Big Three that I wanted to see. During that short day, I also wanted to visit Oakwood, a historical cemetery nearby, famous for its masonic origin and planning. While intented to be very different from most religious Christian cemeteries, the constant use of obelisks in lieu of crosses defeating the purpose of such positioning. Furthermore, there remained here and there religious symbols of Christianity and Judaism.

What intrigued me really were the texts; there seemed to be a strange juxtaposition of words. Though it all happened in a cemetery, it felt like a real life actuation of “Life, a user’s manual” by Georges Perec:

Through the tombstone names engraved, there were references to chapters of life, its tribulations and the music of it: Wagner, Mendelssohn, Mother, White, Lies, Niagara, Good, Teller, Small. All these names and many more seemed a riddle to life itself with an unknown path to follow. Where was the endpoint of it? It sure could be the theme of my visual quest of the past half-century… as in the Chess game, a sort of Cavalier’s Polygraph. Going all around with steps to follow and no going back. Was life itself such? Could one at least have a gaze of the whole process? It is only while putting order in the gigantic puzzle of half a century’s worth of images that I remembered:

“The eye travels the path cut out for it in the work.” (Paul Klee)