For two are the gates of shadowy dreams, and one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory.
- Homer, The Odyssey
The day I arrived on Crete, I saw a man die.
It was a car crash. Head-on. High-speed. The two vehicles suddenly synthesized, becoming warped mirror reflections of each other on the blistering tarmac of the E 75.
That night, the man visited my dreams. As he leaned in close to speak, no words came, just the faintest sounds of grinding machinery, which could have been mistaken for the rhythm of waves crashing or wind rustling the leaves of olive trees. Within the dream’s circular logic, this language from the deep made a certain sense. I recall it both as a comfort and a warning. But when I woke, whatever specific meaning it carried scattered into the darkness. I was left only with the distinct image of the man in my room, drifting toward me in the half-light, speaking in confidence like an old friend.
The trip was meant to be a vacation. My first proper getaway with my wife since our son was born four years ago. But as we explored Crete, gorgeous and austere and mythic, I saw echoes of the man—and the machinery of his demise—everywhere. Flesh. Metal. Water. Stone. Air. Permeable surfaces, fragile surfaces, unyielding surfaces. All acting upon each other, reshaping each other, damaging each other.
As a longtime social-environmental documentary photographer, these themes are familiar to me. Most of my work is about the complex ways that people shape, and are shaped by, the places they call home. But it is rare for me to deliberately seek out external analogs for internal states of mind, as this project does. Through the Gates of Horn and Ivory represents the exploration of a new kind of documentary photographic language for me that straddles the material and the mythic, the real and the illusory, the waking and the dreaming.
