Page 45 Review by Jonathan
A challenge to my inability to communicate, to my misanthropy, to my constant need for a challenge.
... A challenge to respect the rules one places upon himself, whether he likes them or not.
... A challenge to find love, the kind we often unknowingly brush against on the street, only to forget a moment later, overwhelmed by the river of our own thoughts, and the thoughts of a million passersby...
That pure love that I have often found in the instance of a photograph...
It is a challenge to the city of New York, the city of my birth, the city that sheltered and cared for me, both physically and mentally, throughout the years...
... Sometimes successfully...
... Sometimes not.
Of course... it's rather tricky to mend a broken heart and find love afresh if you're not planning on speaking to anyone at all for sixty days... Such is the scope of the emotionally self-sequestering challenge that Sam is taking on, at his own behest, and also his magazine's editor Jorge. I think that probably reveals that Sam is a masochist and Jorge definitely has sadist tendencies, but it's certainly an intriguing premise to explore both the fractured psychology of an individual and also the near-infinite fractal human interactions taking place within a city like New York on a continuous basis. Like an endless game of bagatelle with eight million unpredictable balls, with pointy elbows, pinging around on the most insanely complex ever evolving three-dimensional board imaginable. How could you possibly hope to find the one person able to repair you emotionally in such an environment?
Our story begins with an unknown person narrating Sam's epic undertaking to us, and also providing us with some personal background on our protagonist. Thus we gradually begin to understand the apparent reasons for his peculiar experiment as he strolls through the city of his birth, all the while carefully composing and taking photographs. I had presumed the narrator would turn out to be a possible future soulmate looking back sagely. In fact, it turns out to be someone completely different and entirely unexpected. And yet it makes perfect sense, in retrospect.
Giamcomo Bevilacqua treats us to a visual feast with shots of skyscrapers, Central Park and people, lots of people, from every conceivable aperture and angle. His art style, particularly of architecture, reminds me of Paul ALL OVER COFFEE / EVERYTHING IS ITS OWN REWARD Madonna, though a touch tighter. Plus this work is all in vibrant colour that perfectly captures the feel of a gloriously bright autumn day, even down to striations of wispy cloud being gently pulled across the sky, accompanied by the vapour trail from a departing aeroplane. The only thing that's black and white are Sam's photographs. As a creature of habit, he's only ever printed his photographs sans colour, preferring to use the same print shop whenever he's in the neighbourhood.
So, what happens to shatter Sam's pseudo-serenity and deflect our tale into an altogether different direction? Well, it's the unexpected presence of a red-haired girl in many of his most recent batch of photographs. She's definitely there, in full glorious technicolour, which is a conundrum in and of itself given the photos obviously aren't. But the real puzzle perhaps, is that Sam is entirely certain she wasn't there when he took the pictures. Not once. After all, as someone who carefully composes every picture he takes, he knows exactly what, and who, is in the scene he wants to convey. And the girl was most assuredly not, when he took the pictures, in any of them...
Thus begins Sam's real journey of introspection, finally getting below the protective surface layers he'd so carefully built up, as the mysterious red-haired girl begins to appear in front of him in the real world, seemingly at every turn. Sam's reaction is always to turn away, to run, to flee. But what precisely is he really running from? And where will he end up? And who will be there? Some connections, however tenuously established, it seems, just can't be broken...
What a wonderfully moving, poignant and beautiful work this is. As we, and Sam, finally gain a true understanding of what's going on inside his head, plus out there in New York city, it seems all those millions and millions of endless human collisions can produce some quite startling and unexpected results.
