In his introduction, entitled “The Year of the Cat,” Brian Hendricks argues that we “need to reclaim our imaginations. Translate our dreams and hopes into thoughts, ideas and actions.” He gives us several examples of people who have done just that, including Viggo Mortensen, Noam Chomsky, Molly Parker and K-OS, “as their role as both spectators and actors allows them to share their wisdom and artistry with the rest of us.”
Viggo Mortensen
‘We serve as the nexus points through which things pass; we’re a place for sensations, images, meanings, words, people, and objects to come together. We constantly filter these facts, impressions, events, and emotions, endlessly selecting, and in many ways we ourselves are the result of those selections—whether hysterical, lazy, indifferent, passionate, etc. What we select has a coherence precisely because we have ourselves selected it.’ Kevin Power, Coincidence of Memory
Viggo Mortensen is a photographer, an actor, a painter, and a poet. As a photographer, he is the author of Recent Forgeries, Un hueco en el sol, Signlanguage, Hole in the Sun, Coincidence of Memory, 45301, and most recently, Miyelo. Taken from a single roll of film, the latter manages to aptly capture a Lakota Ghost Dance as a vision or a delirious dream. This ephemeral quality pervades Viggo Mortensen’s work. As an artist he takes the time to look carefully at the world around him. The moments he captures are based on lived experiences. They are also transient. Subject to both time and perception they feel as they cannot last. When last seen, Viggo was leaving Los Angeles for New Zealand. We hope and trust his cameras are with him. Viggo’s photographs in this issue were shot during his recent travels to Morocco, [Erfoud and Merzouga] and the Northern Plains of the United States.