Downtown in my Mind:
Disaggregated, Depopulate

I take my camera to cities to experience the glitter of sunlight or moonlight on glass, to capture the angles of buildings crowding upon each other, competing for space by shooting up into the sky. Cities are gritty but they are also stunningly beautiful despite their dirt, their crowds and their cacaphonous noise. Cities create energy; they do not sap it. They encourage people to move faster, to get more done, to live intensely at a challenging pace.

I have been shooting in cities for years -- tens of thousands of photographs of streets, skyscrapers, parks, interiors of office buildings, museums, even parking garages, subways, train stations. My photographs are abstract, mostly nonrepresentational. They give very few clues as their exact location or to their particular subject matter.

And ironically, or maybe helpfully, in our current crisis of pandemic, they never include people. This is deliberate. People in photographs absorb energy. Observing their movements, we feel their pace, their hurried and often obstructed path through the crowd. But, when no one is present, the energy that the city gives off is transmitted to us.

My city, devoid of people is not nostalgic. Roland Barthes asserts that "a photograph is a witness [to] what has been. Every image is an image of death." But Barthes is wrong. As Einstein showed us, the equation runs two ways: energy can transform into mass -- light and a camera produce the photograph -- but mass can transform into energy as well.

My photographs do not record past moments. Instead, they create their own energy. Like Cezanne's paintings, they live and breathe. They celebrate life and defy death. My images are digital but never constructed. Everything in them is real. They remind us of our own transcendence, embodying the moment when mass becomes energy. In that moment, we know ourselves to be infinite, inextricably a part of the universe. We perceive that, when we die, we will merely change in form. Nothing is ever lost. The energy of those we loved exists forever all around us. And we will too.

I offer these photographs to lift our spirits during this disaggregated, troubled time. Our cities and our world await our return to it, but, in the meantime, let us use our powers of imagination to receive their energy and to lighten our anxiety as we remain shut in our separate spaces.

Fern L. Nesson
March, 2020