“Being alone isn’t being lonely. Being lonely. Didn’t that band sing
that song about being lonely? We were never feeling lonely.‘Cause
we were never being alone. We had too much time to find for ourselves.
That’s not right. Yes, yes. And we were never being lonely. We dressed
up and fought, then thought ‘Make amends’… Being lonely. Bruce
Weber shot the video in romantic black and white at the Shangri-La
in Santa Monica. I never dreamt that I would get to be. The creature
that I always meant to be… Was Bruce Weber canceled or did he just
fade away? No, no, Being Boring is what the Pet Shop Boys sang. We
were never being bored. ‘Cause we were never being boring. Oh, that’s
different than being alone.”
- Bruce Hainley in “being alone”
Designed to protect its occupants from judgement and persecution,
the artist enshrines these private rooms, continuing his documentation
of the architecture and physical characteristics of queer spaces.
While Sameshima atypically retains the presence of bodies in these
images, with no identifying features revealed, his focus locates more
deliberately on the anonymity of these individuals alongside the
emptiness that surrounds them.
Much like in Erdbeermund, a series of photographs of glory holes; or
Numbers, an ongoing project of paintings where hypothetically joining
a series of dots would form the outlines of explicit scenes, Sameshima
concerns himself with depicting that which is hidden or concealed.
Comparatively, in being alone, Sameshima’s highly contrasted
photographs totally vacate the cinema screens of imagery, with this
emptiness itself implying the liminality that queerness and queer desire
can occupy. This interest in negative space – in gaps, openings and
cavities – as a tool for concealment, similarly reverberates through
this series. Devoid of any pornographic material, Sameshima’s images
instead accumulate the remnants of presence, of a collective and
pervading aloneness.
Designed by Robert Milne and edited by Antonia Marsh, the book features a newly commissioned essay from American writer, critic and poet Bruce Hainley.
Dean Sameshima (b. 1971, Torrance, CA) lives and works in Berlin.
Hardcover,
88 pages, 30 × 21.6, English, published in the UK, edition of 500, July 2024.
