Torrance York
Torrance York
Semaphore
Hardcover
21 x 24 cm
96 pages
67 color illustration
2022
Kehrer Verlag
About the Book:
In Semaphore I examine the shift in my perspective after being diagnosed eight years ago with Parkinson’s disease. Through images, I consider what it means to integrate this life-altering information into my sense of self. What does acceptance look like? Post diagnosis, everyday items and experiences take on new meaning. New tasks top my “to do” list each day. Simple tools now present a challenge and uncertainty pervades the periphery. As I look around me, the branches of trees become networks of neurons. Acknowledging these signals facilitates the process of adaptation. Optimism holds the key for me right now. Light, always an inspiration, illuminates a path for me to follow. And I go. Parkinson’s disease is the world’s fastest-growing brain disorder. Currently, over ten million people live with Parkinson’s worldwide. With Semaphore, I want to foster a greater understanding of the experience of living with Parkinson’s and encourage dialogue that includes the often taboo subjects of illness and vulnerability. While this project is relevant to the Parkinson’s community, it also connects with others whose journeys require growth, patience, and perseverance to move forward.
Book review by Max Cavitch |
In 2015, Torrance York was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, an incurable movement disorder of the nervous system that progresses slowly over years in most patients, with symptoms including tremors, stiff muscles, impaired balance, and slurred speech. These symptoms tend to worsen as the disease progresses, which can lead to psychological and cognitive difficulties as well—all of which are the result of the slow breakdown of neurons in the brain, including the neurons responsible for producing crucial chemical messengers such as dopamine and norepinephrine. In other words, the brain slowly loses its ability to send necessary signals to other parts of the body.
The title of York’s recent book, Semaphore, is a word that comes from the Ancient Greek terms sēma, meaning “sign” or “signal,” and phoros, meaning “carrier” or “bearer.” In contemporary speech, we use the word primarily to refer to systems of communication that transmit information visually, over distances that voices can’t span—often by using hand-held flags or other objects such as paddles, batons, or just hands. It’s a kind of optical telegraphy, still commonly used in the maritime world, on airport runways, and in mountaineering—all realms in which the signals being transmitted are vitally important, often urgent. One semaphore that everyone knows is the standard distress signal, SOS, which, in English, is a “backronym” for such phrases as “Save Our Ship” and “Save Our Souls.”
© Torrance York
As York explains, “the word ‘semaphore’ grabbed my attention in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale” (p. 95)—a dystopian novel in which the word’s meanings and associations are greatly expanded, due to the pervasive suppression of women’s speech. In the novel’s setting, the Republic of Gilead, communication itself is an act of rebellion. In York’s post-diagnosis life, photography (literally, “writing with light”) is a way both to acknowledge, or “signal,” her disease and to transmit signs of quiet resistance to the limitations that Parkinson’s seeks to impose upon her (and the roughly ten million other people with Parkinson’s around the world).
The book includes well over sixty photographs, ranging from portraits to landscapes, still lives, abstract and conceptual shots, and x-ray and MRI images. The book’s first “semaphore” is a frontispiece image of the chemical structure of dopamine—that crucial neuromodulatory molecule that Parkinson’s patients gradually lose to the disease. The semaphores/photographs that follow bear signs of the external world as York perceives and interprets them from the perspective of her changing internal neurochemistry: the moon shining through the out-of-focus leaves of a tree (p. 9 and the book’s front cover); an abandoned birds’ nest against a white background (p. 11); the warm brown eyes of a brindled dog (p. 13); shards of a broken mirror (p. 15); two women embracing (p. 49); cryptic patterns drawn in sand (pp. 12 and 50); the vulnerability of flesh in a bruised foot (p. 69); and, inevitably, mortality, as in the carcass of a long-nosed rodent (p.79).
© Torrance York
Some of the photographs signal forms of manual dexterity that—like operating a camera—are likely to become increasingly difficult for anyone with Parkinson’s: buttoning a shirt-cuff (p. 82); using an old Underwood typewriter (p. 83); lighting and tending a fire (p. 75); slicing vegetables (p. 62); even holding hands with another person (p. 42).
Occasionally, among the photographs, York interpolates lines of text. They begin as questions—“Can I be this adaptive?” (p. 26) and “Is it my DNA?” (p. 33)—but thereafter become statements, assertions: “Balance itself is a goal” (p. 44); “I turn towards the sun” (p. 55); “There are no days off” (p. 63); and “I never felt asymmetrical before” (p. 76). At the end of the book, there is a brief “Artist Statement” and a longer essay by curator Rebecca Senf. The images themselves have no captions, and there is no descriptive photo list at the end of the book. But this seems appropriate to the book’s “semaphore” theme of wordless communication—not the clichéd “a picture’s worth a thousand…,” but instead, perhaps, a sign of acceptance that speech, too, is affected by Parkinson’s.
© Torrance York
Even vision can be compromised by this disease, with some patients experience blurring, double-vision, and focusing difficulty. York signals this particularly frightening possibility in several of the book’s images, including a photograph of garbled, partially legible text on what appears to be a computer screen (p. 17). Another photograph—one of the abstract compositions—depicts a shadowy aperture through which a blurred, black-and-white half-moon is visible (p. 23). There are actually several photographs that play with the aperture motif, including someone holding a rondelle of ice from a dog’s water-bowl (p. 21); the interior of a cardboard box (p. 27); a corona of magenta flower petals (p. 43); and a silhouette of the white-hot, blinding sun (p. 58).
One of the book’s most poignant images shows two outstretched hands (the photographer’s?) reaching into empty white space (p. 25). This image seems to ask us to consider how both our eyes and our hands seek out things in the world and (sometimes) bring them back, whether as tangible objects we can keep hold of or as images to be stored in our biological or techno-prosthetic memories. For such a simple composition, it’s highly evocative. For example, in addition to the eye/hand association, it harkens back to the fundamental meaning of “semaphore” as a hand-signal to someone out of hearing-range. It could also be viewed as a kind of stop-motion image of two hands in mid-clap; or coming together as praying hands; or spreading wide—as Semaphore itself does—to welcome the day.
© Torrance York
