Charlie Simokaitis - The Crisis Tapes

Charlie Simokaitis’ The Crisis Tapes opens with an image of a teenage girl. Her glasses have slid down her nose enough for the rim to align with her shut eyelids. Something is unsettling about her pose, as if the fact that our eyes don’t meet hers was somehow associated with her capacity to see. The many images that follow, varying in subject matter and composition, don’t provide an answer. They include, among other things, domestic rooms, airshafts, demolished houses, forest trees, dogs, and a vulture. This leaves the issue of vision lingering in the air, establishing a correlation with the many thresholds throughout the sequence, some of which are abstract, like a light falloff leading to darkness. Geometric shapes emerge as another motif, with an assortment of circles and triangles giving the book a pleasant rhythm. Yet, when we reach the end, little seems to connect these images beyond their formal relations, to the extent that having a variety of scenes and things appears to be the book’s main proposition.

The Crisis Tapes has been devised to operate cryptically and symbolically in equal measure.

Thinking back on my first experience of the book, I only related the girl’s pose to the idea of failing vision because I had read the press release on the publisher’s website. Because the photograph isn’t explicit, reading it as an awkward moment without consequence or as outtakes in a studio session wouldn’t be surprising. Except for the last picture, which shows the girl undergoing an ophthalmological test, nothing in the sequence provides the viewer with information about her medical condition. The title doesn’t clarify this either, and it’s impossible to pinpoint what the words allude to. How to proceed then? Take the Walkeresque image of an old kitchen curtain. Some might associate it with common domestic crises around abandonment or economic downfall, but shoehorning our interpretations around the title would be counterproductive. If the images are challenging to decode, it’s because The Crisis Tapes has been devised to operate cryptically and symbolically in equal measure.

According to the blurb, the book is “an account of his daughter’s gradual loss of the ability to see, and of her powerful psychological response to an imminent, and presumably diminished, reality […]. Over time, Simokaitis and his wife found that they had assumed the role of subjective interpreters of the visible world…” This perfectly summarizes the book’s premise and intentions, yet it features nowhere between its covers. My main issue with this kind of editorial direction is not that it results in an abstract work, but that it divorces the visual narrative from a textual framework that supplies essential context. A book should contain whatever’s necessary to comprehend it adequately, except that in this case, a significant amount of trust has been placed in an external paratext accessible only through a website. Given that books travel and websites expire, the exclusion of this text means that, at some point, The Crisis Tapes will only be judged by what can be inferred from the pictures.

This book joins the efforts of writers like Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce in suggesting that our imagination, that mysterious gift through which we achieve so much … is as important as sight to develop an understanding of reality.

This may not seem like a big deal to those who believe that photographs are self-evident, but I don’t think we can truly appreciate The Crisis Tapes if we ignore its backstory. In other words, I disagree that texts shouldn’t interfere with photobooks. Subscribing to that idea amounts to believing that photographs need to be protected from the corrupting influence of words. This view isn’t only reductive but false given that The Crisis Tapes relies on this paratext for its promotion. If anything, the opposite is true. The short statement amplifies the reach of the photographs and, therefore, their capacity to convey meaning. Incorporating it somewhere in the book would have sufficed, although delving deeper into the young woman’s feelings (and those of her parents) could have also been interesting. This is not to say that viewers won’t connect emotionally and intellectually with these pictures if they don’t engage with the blurb. They will just have an incomplete experience of their capacity to suggest feelings and states of mind.

This issue aside, The Crisis Tapes is an exceptionally printed book. Its deep, dark tones hint at the protagonist’s tacit ailment but also summon us to revisit it often to appreciate it more accurately. The mysteriousness of the images makes it easy to comply with this demand. I wish a similarly risky approach had been taken with the layout, which comes across as unnecessarily conservative. Having the pictures only on the right page facilitates their comprehension, but at the cost of creating a stasis that interferes with their capacity to generate an even more complex montage. Variations in size and placement could have generated a productive friction that stressed the idea of crisis on multiple levels.

Seeing is so vital to our capacity to absorb the world that it’s tempting to think we can know it just by looking attentively. However, this book joins the efforts of writers like Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce in suggesting that our imagination, that mysterious gift through which we achieve so much (including piecing together disparate images), is as important as sight to develop an understanding of reality. While The Crisis Tapes won’t solve the philosophical conundrum of whether the world is separate from our mind, it can induce a consideration of somatic experiences beyond what our eyes can see, even if, paradoxically, we require that very faculty to engage with these images and their crucial paratext that give us access to the primary motivation behind their making. But if we’re diligent and take that extra step of reading, our relation to the images will change, bringing us closer to the experience of Simokaitis’s daughter.