Hiya!

What’s the most interesting museum that you’ve been in?* What stuck with you about it? Musty walls and drab corridors? Glimmering stolen goods squirreled away behind thick glass, seductively posed to accentuate their literally stolen valor? Windings pathways down into a pyramid, your feet nearly wet as you find yourself seemingly in ancient Egypt?

The Field Museum has a very elaborate pyramid mock-up, if you weren’t aware.

Museums, staid homes to assorted vestiges of life on our planet, tended to have boring interactive elements (a lot still do, to be honest). Usually, they might be a simple field recording or a drab voiceover. I believe that in something so mundane, however, is an important manner of documentation that might be good to revisit and maintain. The Field Museum gives visitors a chance to be treated to the unique experience of a recording of the Kaua’i ʻōʻō bird. Depressing a small, plastic button lets you hear a sound we will likely never hear again. The Kaua’i ʻōʻō was the first of any bird species to go extinct in over 500 years, having been taken from us in 1987 (or thereabouts). You can listen to the last recording of the last known of it’s kind here.

I still remember going to the Field in 2019 and hearing this recording. Something about only having a few seconds of audio and this image to try to give life to something (an entire class of things, which had existed for millennia) sobered me, etched itself into me. All you have when you’re there is a button, a picture, some audio, and your imagination. It’s up to you to fill the scene from these pieces you’re given.

True to the name of this photoletter, I’m a fan of the beautiful physicality of being human; our experiences provide us ways in which we can imagine new realities or consider prior things and even reconsider what we see today.

So, in that spirit, the next photoletter will be a combination of spring and summer (sorry hehe - the next one will follow pretty shortly after, don’t worry). I’ll be documenting what it’s like to experience the glory of FIFA 26 in Atlanta through photo and audio. Officials and politicians across the city breathlessly cater to the whims of those wealthier than anyone reading this email could even begin to understand - the rest of us get what? I want to document that while using the limitations of a single photo with a brief audio snippet to invite you to place yourself in the settings. In limiting what we see and altering how we then interact with how we hear that, I think we may be able to better empathize and enter into solidarity with the subjects I’ll try to portray.

You’ll get a little USB stick with a sound+photo video file (but not a moving picture!), similar to the Field exhibit I was describing earlier. I’ve done a few of this type of art/documentation before, here’s two examples.

(I can’t embed videos in an email really :P)

Example 1 - Cars racing past a light pole marking where a man on a scooter was run down by the driver of an RV in Atlanta: https://drive.proton.me/urls/DFWHVDQCEC#2wwnuVOg8FS7

Example 2 - A market street at night in Dijon, France: https://drive.proton.me/urls/T0MJ2YQK9C#p2SjgdBsnwek

If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll send a USB to you in about a month or so!

~ Aiya R.

*I am not joking, please tell me I would love to hear your stories about this!