Dandelion is a record of the last two years of our life together, from spring 2020 to spring 2022, which coincided with my wife’s cancer diagnosis and the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic.
When people asked my wife Jo-hsin what I take pictures of she would say “rocks and trash.” This project is perhaps my most sustained effort yet at looking at rocks and trash, but it is also the places we went, the things we talked about, and what our home was like before it was ripped apart by cancer.
It started as an attempt to record our immediate neighborhood during walks. Small changes could be seen from day to day, in still lives and residential architecture. Then threads developed: flowers, lions, health, togetherness and alienation, change, the simultaneous need for human contact and fear of the consequences.
Discarded objects speak to the contrasts made apparent by the pandemic: increased poverty, joblessness, eviction, the struggle for racial equality, and the stakes of the 2020 presidential election.
The image sequence is chronological, reflecting the shrinking and expanding of our movements based on health factors. The texts, pulled from journal entries, are chronological overall, but shift within each section, echoing the muddying and blurring of days that we felt during this time. -Publisher
