Sunday, May 17, 2009

Moses


Moses ©evertson digital collage

A big thank you to the Hartford Courant for using my digital
collage "Moses" for the cover of an iTowns section today.
The backstory of this picture occurred many years ago. I worked
for an art gallery in NYC and one of my morning jobs was to
evict any homeless that had taken up residence in the doorway
for the night. Moses was always there and it was always hurtful
to me to try and pry him loose from his appropriated home. He
would move off with his shopping cart amid a flurry of
curses. One day while I was along the west side highway
taking photographs I ran into him as he collected scrap metal.
For the first time in a year he was together enough to find out
that he was a Vietnam vet. Alcoholic and perhaps suffering from
mental health issues, Moses was a tip to the iceberg of
our failure to care for our country's homeless. One day he
simply vanished. This piece combined elements of urban and
forest in the hope that we can find a "promised land" for our lost.

5 comments:

Owen said...

Hey Bill, that is a great collage and an even greater story... short and sweet ! So he just vanished ? That's scary, I hope he's ok. But really excellent image you created there... Is that on Photoshop? Or actually cut and pasted with paper ?

And I hope you are ok after the hard drive crash. (btw, I think that was Pennywise's doing too...)(or maybe it was one of the witches you've been studying... dangerous to mess around with those folks !) Hope you were able to clear the eclipse lyrics out finally ! :-D

William Evertson said...

Thanks Owen - I used four photos to collage in Photoshop. Quite a bit of pixel by pixel work here. I am almost whole from my crash; some photos gone forever but now I have Mac's time machine running backup every hour and lucky for me I've been copying enough music back into ITunes to finally clear out clown lyrics ;)

Art said...

Good to hear the computer failure is under control. I loved the story behind the image too--the image came out brilliantly.

jafabrit said...

what a heartfelt post and wonderful photograph.

sarah elizabeth said...

This is a really powerful image and story!