107 Shandon Street

If you follow the river that meanders through Cork, you'll eventually come across Shandon Street. Take a right and walk up the narrow street. If you're not careful, you'll almost miss the weathered red building, 107 Shandon. It will be on your left. The words "the gallery with no name" will be typed on printer paper, and taped to the inside of the window. A woman sitting behind a low table, sipping her coffee, will look out at the sleepy street. Does she see you?

This summer, I took a similar journey up Shandon Street in search of the gallery with no name. A member of our group wanted to see a photography exhibition, and I, being the true daughter of art collectors, could not refuse. So we set out and found the place, the taped up letters, the woman with her hair swept back, the peeling paint. The photographs that I viewed in the twenty minutes that followed changed the way I thought about my summer in England and Ireland--and much of my life. You've probably never heard of Taf Hassam. He was born in England two years before I was born in the States. He is an actor and a musician and a photographer. This exhibition, "Traces," was his first solo show.

The idea was simple enough: capturing moments from life through still-lives and portraits. He called the still-lives "traces," and the portraits, "glances." Mr. Hassam didn't attempt to tell us what happened before or after each image. Nor did he concern himself with developing a coherent narrative to link the photographs. He permitted the impressions to be precisely that--seemingly insignificant glimpses that somehow lingered long in the mind. A poet noted:
It is fitting, therefore, that so many of these works are printed on cartridge paper and notepaper. For they are like pages ripped from a journalist's notebook, presenting us with fragments and suggestions, with scraps of story rather than any sustained and continuous narrative.

I find that immensely helpful. This summer I spent so much energy trying to figure out how everything connected: wonderful spaghetti eaten in a London cafe and the terror attacks, and the salt breeze on the southern coast and Oxford students gratuitously making out in the gardens, and used bookstores, and rain and heat and homesickness. I believe that somehow it all really does fit, even though the narrative is not apparent to me. Perhaps one day all will be made known, and I will see. But until then, let things be what they are: glances and traces, incomplete but no less beautiful. I've titled this "the blog with no name" in honor of that gallery in Cork. And, like the exhibition this summer, what will fill this space will most likely be "fragments and suggestions...scraps of story," my story. Glances of thought and traces of life. Part of who I am today. Let the before and after take care of themselves.