Prufrock’s Days of Hands

One day my high school English teacher ate an imaginary peach in front of the class, complete with juice running down her arm. Even as adolescents we knew that T. S. Eliot had more than that in mind when he wrote The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, but we had yet to get stuck in the messy temptations of adult life. Maybe that’s why the poem is introduced to teenagers. So that it can unfold over the years and offer something new with each re-reading.

As my dad was nearing the end of his life, the poem’s phrase “days of hands” kept running through my mind. It is a reminder of how little time we have to reach out into the world.

So I started walking the streets of Los Angeles with a tiny roll film camera, looking for evidence of that basic human need—to touch, to draw things near. But then I discovered other aspects of Prufrock’s world all around me, even finding traces in some of my earliest negatives. And so began a book project, honoring the whole of Eliot’s masterwork while pulling it into the 21st century.

The text pages were torn from hardbound collections of Eliot’s work. Lines were struck out with pencil to pace the reader and juxtapose specific passages with imagery. Here are some samples…