INTRODUCING KRISTOPHER K. HELTON
I was born and raised in Florida, around Ft. Lauderdale. A place called Hollywood. Way uglier than the other one. I don’t live there anymore. Florida is a weird dimension. Like a snake somehow. Death is in the south, in the reeds. I feel like the sun is brighter around the very bottom, all of my memories from then are bleached out for it. I spent a little more than a year in Gainesville spread across three. It is a swamp. It can feel really ruined and primordial, spanish moss pretty much drowns the sky. Everything melts you. The water is fresh and there are gators. Northern parts are void nowheres. Bioluminescent algae on the west coast. Florida is hell, in the best way. I’m 23. In Christmas 2007, I went on a winter’s journey with a girl to a cabin in the mountains. My mother lent me a camera. A whirlwind of bad drugs, waterfalls and wild horses. I ended up stealing so much film. I wanted to trace a map of my life as it all fell out. I wanted to give things immortality. It’s like this: There’s an orange and I feel like I’m dying, let me take a picture that makes you feel death. As well, my photos to me take a piece of one thing and in seeking the whole, become agents of ramification—splitting apart the thing until it is new again, or maybe dead or lost. My life has changed in a ton of ways. I think if you start to cultivate a life of seeing things, you start to become untethered from the immaterial fabric of the world. I think in some ways I am more withdrawn from ‘being’ than I would like. I think I prefer ugliness now. I want the camera Weegee used. This photo is of a night in the east Atlanta ghetto, sliding thru the cemetery and doing coke by moonlight. It all lasted well into the morning and spilled into a long drive to the mountains, friends and visions. When I think of other photographs that are not mine, I think I seek an otherness. I want to feel warped and bent by the images; I want some ugly idea of having company or friends in. If I were to show other photographs, they would be by Jimmy Limit , Susu Laroche & Nina Hartmann. Jimmy is pure blackmetal and fear; the raw content of evil and moreso mischief in his work is so sublime and it calls to me, I want to be there but there is totally alone in a fog. Susu is goth myths and death mystery; nothings like it, everything feels it’s been exumed out of a cellar and life was never anything but sorrowful and holy. Nina is a dread of death, or maybe love of youth; I think I am most often into the assimilation of subject to its environment and also a weird of permanent lostness or chaos.
