In Memoriam: a photographer lipping past the light

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”—Martin Luther King Jr.,

“Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.”-david foster wallace

"True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”-david foster wallace

We often spoke about David Foster Wallace: one of my heroes.....

I learned alot, over the years, from my dear friend Jeffrey George Hladun ❤

He was a towering (literally and figuratively) friend, to whom luminous is not an exaggeration.....

Yesterday, I was told that Jeff recently and suddenly died.....a thunderbolt to each of us who knew, respected, adored and loved Jeff....he was many things to many people, to his family and friends, to photographers and non-photographers alike....

Jeff was a real and true mensch....a rare one.....

I first met Jeff through our shared writing at BURN MAGAZINE . Both of us, photographers, wrote ridiculously long and drunkenly constructed comments about the work there, both lovers of the magazine and photography....both drunken on the art form...

Eventually, we met in person and talk and drank (hours) and smoked (hours)....later, I had Jeff over to my house (for late night drinks and talks)....and we went to Photo/Portfolio reviews that I often did with Brett Gundlock and Johan Hallberg Campbell and Don Webber for Boreal Collective.....

We also drank with the Magnum Crew when they would come up for their annual stuff for CONTACT Photography Festival ......AND I often showed Jeff the photo projects I was working on....or my book...or my poems...

He had a brilliant eye for detail and language and composition. In fact, I almost never trust others to look at my photographs or poems while Im working on them....but with Jeff I always did....

He and I just spoke via messages a few months ago about what we were doing....when I left the hospital in 2019, he wrote me a long and thoughtful and beautiful letter ...

.i re-read it this morning

I can't believe his beautiful and generous and powerful voice is silenced...and that the sky is dampened...

but these are simply the particulars of the Jeff I knew for more than 13 years.....they do not convey the person he was:

a lifter of lives and skies and hearts...

god damn, mother fucking unfairness of life to take him from us so soon....

and yet, there he was this morning as I walked to school to teach: the vermillion morning sun slipping over the buildings, the sound of the teens practicing tennis at 6:30 am next to my building, the black dogs greeting one another with their yelp and smiling tails and the new gets renewed...

that is jeff: a magician of renewal and life

one of the kindest and smartest and most loving men i have ever met...

i hold your voice in my heart forever....

i love you and miss you Jeff

There go we in this world, impossible if not for people like you, light carrier and essential- born jewel....

That question at the Center of my life and is the centre of my art: my poetry and my photography: how and what to make of suffering, loss and our grief for catastrophe has knobbed at me my entire life, as it has now all of us.

What is the solution?……

To survive, to live, to love, to make and to go on, we must go on.

Jeff, your ascension is our ladder, let us remain as courageous, as you were...

May these words honour his luminous and incandescent presence, always.

with love,

bob

❤

for: Jeffrey George Hladun, photographer, writer, friend, mensch