One Man’s Body, Year 3
Works and words by Nathan Cordova
Interview via emails, February 2020
Tell us about the One Man's Body project. Where does the work we're looking at today fit into that ongoing series?
Year 1 of the project resulted in a zine.
I felt vulnerable and surrounded by death in the spring of 2017 when I began OMB. I started by examining my relationship with my father, my primary model for masculinity.
He passed away in 2015 and, every fall since 2017, I make a pilgrimage to Colorado and New Mexico to make photographs of the people and places that have shaped my father, our family and ultimately myself. I also journal to my father, including him in my process.
I’ve been making pictures simultaneously in California where I currently live. I think the lands and people of CA and NM are both grappling with similar legacies, aspirations and shared traumas.
One of the editioned, art objects created for year 2 of the One Man’s Body project.
Every year that I work on OMB, I produce a limited-edition art object from the work I made that year. 2017’s looked like a traditional zine, 2018’s looked like road maps, and 2019’s (which I just finished in December) resembles a family photo album. It contains 19 original B&W photographic prints and 4 objects resembling road maps with original photographs, hand-lettering and ink on paper.
2020’s trip will be my fourth and last. I blog about my process, these trips and how I work through ideas every week on my Patreon if you’re interested in finding out more or supporting a working artist: patreon.com/NathanCordova
This is Nathan Cordova’s 3rd limited-edition art object in a series he predicts will conclude with the 4th iteration.
How did the format of a "family photo album" come to be the framework for this year's iteration?
I think my dad provided spiritual depth and passion growing up and that my mom provided the material and psychological space for me to explore and nurture my inner life. The form of each year’s object has been deeply influenced by her.
The thing I wanted to be the most when I grew up was a map maker. I taped sheets of 8.5x11 paper together and drew elaborate maps by hand. I think I understood, intuitively, that each mark of the pen created the implications of a story. I helped my mom clean out her home office in early 2018 and I came upon a AAA road map of NM. I immediately thought of my project. Later, I experimented with printing on different archival road maps, but this time, maps of places in California shaped by Spanish colonialism, like, SF, Santa Cruz, San Gabriel and San Diego.
My mom passed that June, 2018, and it took about a year to clean out the house we grew up in. I loved the iconic colored-leather with the gold-leaf of many of the family albums I found. 2019’s object is a deconstructed family album. The inside has end sheets and is all hand cut paper and the 19 original prints are tipped-in. Those interior elements were inspired by an iconic handmade family photo album that exists on my dad’s side and belongs to my cousin. The size too was influenced by the size of that album, 14”x14”. This year’s object also includes 4 original objects inspired by the road maps from 2018’s iteration.
Did conceptualizing the work in the form of a family photo album help you make sense of the pictures you’ve taken over the last year?
This year’s batch of photographs included many of my mom, who had recently passed. My mom was white, my dad was not, and I had a lot of unanswered questions about how I might incorporate those images into the larger body of work I’d been making. I was never 100% confident that those would be included until relatively close to the end of the sequencing process. I came to the family album idea by examining every last object my mom and dad possessed and asking myself the question, “How do I relate to this?”
The way that I relate to my father also affects the way I relate to my mother and vice versa. I believe the pictures in OMB are autobiographical. I think family albums, and how we construct them, are selective representations of who we imagine ourselves to be and our aspirations. My “family album” is lonely and sad, obsessive and passionate. It’s honest. It’s full of death, change, and multiplicities of meaning. Just like me...conflicted!
I also think the decision to include the 4 road maps as inserts really unlocked the rest of the photographs. They offer a contrasting narrative voice. What it’s like to be alongside me versus what it’s like to be me. I think of this year’s object less as a book or album and more like a vessel or an ark.
Talk to us about the image of the two dead coyotes?
I made this photograph in New Mexico in the fall of 2018. Coyote is the patriarch, the trickster and schemer. A coyote is also a guide, often for people or material goods. The coyote does not promise a journey without hardships, false promises, or even death. Conversely, I think of La Llorona, the mother in eternal mourning and despair. I believe these two archetypes exist in my family’s collective consciousness and are expressed implicitly through the stories we tell each other about ourselves.
What surprised you, what is something that appeared to you that you weren't expecting, in the process of sequencing this work?
I was curious about the legacies of white supremacy, Spanish colonialism, Manifest Destiny, indigenous erasure, catholic patriarchy, intergenerational and intergender violence and how they affected my father and family for generations across what is now New Mexico and Colorado. This year, especially, I’ve moved into a place of also examining the positive legacies of my family; like ancestor worship, oral storytelling, collective identity, activism, and mutual aid. I think these elements, first the dark and now the light, give the work and this year’s sequencing a depth that wasn’t there before.
One thing I love in 2019’s sequence is that I think it forces me to look at and experience the other printed photographs as maps. A photo has its own visual path or many visual paths. Like a map, each visual symbol in a photograph has its own meaning and, combined, they form a picture thats meaning and metaphor is greater than the sum of its parts.
What artists, books, or influences are you looking at right now?
I’ve been making video-recorded oral histories of living family members at the same time that I’ve been working on this project. The goal is to create a collection that could someday live in an institutional library’s archive. The unintended byproduct of the oral histories is that I’ve become a receptacle for the emotional experiences of many generations. I’m very interested in the process by which stories age out of living-memory and become myth or legend. I’m interested in what knowledge and morals are communicated through them and why.
I love Laura Aguilar and her queer embodiment of the landscape. I’m really digging on “Emergent Strategy” by Adrienne Marie Brown (@AdrienneMarieBrown), and I really like the poet Alán Pelaez Lopez (@MigrantScribble). “An African American and Latinx History of the United States” by Paul Ortiz. “There There” by Tommy Orange.
Perhaps my absolute favorite find lately is a book called “The Matter of Photography in the Americas”, edited by Natalie Brizuela and Jodi Roberts who curated an exhibition of the same name in 2018 at Stanford. It’s an incredible resource and I highly recommend it.
There’s also a few artist-peers of my mine who really helped me work through the sequencing in this latest iteration or supported me in other important ways. Check them out on Instagram: @oxymoron310, @evdogdavis, @erotocado.
Reading Recommendations from this Interview