Weekend Portfolio: Sam Margevicius

Eyes to Swallow With

The photographer John Gossage once said that the foundation of a solid photographic project is built upon being in a certain place for a certain amount of time. I find this simple statement infinitely profound and applicable to life in ways much broader than merely the pursuit of impactful photographs. I have used this approach in a broad variety of places for various amounts of time, but as a photographer I have come to be less interested in the method of capture than in the method of delivery. I like to consider the ways in which a set of photographs can create a space for its viewer to inhabit, and what that viewer might discover during their time there. Try as I might to shift focus toward my method of delivery, it is undeniably tethered to my method of capture. And so, in its present online appearance, my photographic project asks for little more than to be understood as a collection of still photographs that were made in a small town over the course of a month.

The small town pictured is Vicksburg, Michigan. Vicksburg was established when John Vickers built a dam on a creek, making a pond with an adjacent mill. In 1905 that mill became a paper factory, and nearly everyone in Vicksburg worked for the paper factory while it was in operation until 2001. For fifteen years the factory sat empty and the town seemed as though it might follow suit, until a young man named Chris Moore, who had once been a young boy in Vicksburg, returned from the west with a fortune and bought the old factory. He began redeveloping the factory and purchasing land in the town with plans to revitalize Vicksburg as a cultural hub for central Michigan.  

While I was in Vicksburg as the Prairie Ronde Artist in Residence in August of 2019, I walked all over the town,rarely escaping the sound of frogs croaking. My mother reminisces fondly on her time as a child catching frogs, and I often  remember Mark Twain’s story, “The Leap Frogs of Calabasas County,” which recounts the allegedly true melodrama of a local frog racing competition. Wanting to know more about frogs, I caught a few and let them go, but I also read about them. I was amazed to read that frogs use their eyeballs to help swallow their food. They actually close their eyelids and push their eyeballs into their head to help food get down their throat! What better metaphor could I use for myself, a photographer? I find great satisfaction and nourishment in the visible world, all thanks to my eyeballs and the camera optics they inspired. This obscure factoid is responsible for the title of this project, as well as its development in my mind. 

Every day that month I went out with my camera, and together we would look for scenes to develop. Sometimes we looked at the town the way John Vickers or Chris Moore might, taking in various considerations of property value and potential for capital or cultural growth. Other times we looked at the landscape the way a frog might, taking in various considerations of environmental exposure and potential for predators or access to prey. We tried to make photographs that a person could settle into; if not photographs of places they could imagine inhabiting -for people are not frogs- well then perhaps simply photographs they could sit in front of, letting their eyes travel harmoniously across the surface of the photograph and its illusory space.

The old pond

A frog jumped in,

Kerplunk!

Haiku by Matsuo Basho (1686) trans. Allen Ginsburg

To view more of Sam’s work, visit his website here.