Horror as a genre—whether in literature or cinema—did not exist in the Soviet Russia of my youth. The Communist regime, thin skinned and image obsessed, was highly intolerant of any representations that deviated from its utopian narrative of happiness and progress. As a result, I was completely unprepared for what I encountered on American television when my family moved from Moscow to a quiet suburb of Washington, D.C. Knife-wielding psychopaths, demonic possession, haunted houses, revenge-crazed maniacs and zombies comprised the milieu of American horror films of the late 1970s and 1980s. Scores of teenagers were indiscriminately slaughtered on what seemed like an almost nightly basis. The fact that I was only marginally younger than the adolescents depicted on screen left me in a state of both primal fear and morbid curiosity.
As the target of school bullies who regarded me as the diminutive representative of an invading army amassing on the border of the fatherland, I was keenly aware of my position as an outcast. This social isolation amplified my already impressionable mind, making me particularly vulnerable to the violence of films like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Amityville Horror. The atmosphere of dread permeating these films mirrored my emotional reality, and I absorbed every grisly drop of blood with the wide eyed shock of a deer in the headlights. Looking back now, I realize that part of my fascination was that I identified with both the victims and the perpetrators—a connection that continues to render these films as ambivalent touchstones of my early youth.
I stopped watching horror movies a long time ago; my imagination is too vivid to keep what I see safely confined to any one part of my mind. Yet when my wife and I, along with our one-year-old daughter, moved to an old house in rural Connecticut, the displacement we felt quickly recalled the earlier displacement of my youth. The feeling of estrangement, the uncertainty of caring for a young and vulnerable child and the lingering memory of the films from my past, all began to rise to the surface.
The house we rented—dark, wood-paneled, vacant, and filled with strange sounds—was itself a convincing analog for any number of horror movie sets. In that environment, the distance between lived experience and cinematic memory began to collapse. The visual grammar of the horror genre—what I now recognize as an ironic mixture of genuine terror, macabre drama, and self-aware humor—is the basis for the photographs gathered in 5 Garfield Avenue. The images, along with an accompanying short story, evoke the fictional world of horror and suspense to examine themes of displacement, domestic uncertainty, and exile.
5 Garfield Avenue
56 pages
Softcover
Size: 8 1/2 x 11in.
Limited edition of 100 signed and numbered books, each book includes 1 signed and numbered 8 x 10 inch archival pigment print
price: $100