My project “Marcel walks to metal” is now up at Gauss PDF, a site edited by J. Gordon Faylor that hosts all kinds of weird, beautiful, and funny art, most of which exists as PDF files. I’ve long admired this site and it feels good to see my work included there.
I started working on this many years ago, in the Spring of 2013 as I was writing my dissertation. I was walking my dog, listening to an album by blackened power metal band Wintersun, and was struck by the contrast so I took a picture with my phone. This is the first image in the series after the title page.
I kept taking pictures and adding metal lyrics for years, albeit somewhat inconsistently. I did not take any pictures in the year I spent in Champaign, IL, where I completed a one-year post-doc after finishing my PhD. I was extremely depressed that year and didn’t make any art. There is only one image from Tel Aviv, where I lived the next year. The project picks up again in 2015/2016, after I moved back to Durham.
The annotations at the bottom of each photo capture the passage of time and changes in geography. You can also discern signs of aging in Marcel over time, particularly in the whitening fur on his face.
Alex B. Fine 