Stefan Novakovic




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Everything ends. As the realities of climate change, ecological degradation and growing political and economic unrest permeate the fabric of the world, the weight of an uncertain future lingers in every breath. In Ben Dickey’s Inheritance, it lingers in the grain. Here are ransacked rooms, boulders and burning forests, dying nests and honeycombs. And here are his parents, captured in intimate portraits, in shadows, and in the ordinary moments of familial and romantic love.

Bridging domestic and planetary scales, the procession of images weaves together a richly lyrical narrative. From the cosmos of insects to terrestrial landscapes and human habitat, all of it is suffused with the sense of an ending; the temporal bounds of our lives — and life itself — on earth and the gaping, seemingly infinite maw of preemptive grief. Yet, Inheritance is both elegy and hymn. A turn of the page offers nothing as simple as juxtaposition or simile, instead unfolding a realm of tender and uneasy analogue. There is softness and splendour within entropy itself. There is loss, suffering, decay and conflict — and there are small graces, moments of seemingly accidental beauty made somehow more divine by their banality: A room of broken chairs. A sapling. A pair of lovers’ hands that meet in a fragile embrace.

Time marches on. Forests burn, buildings are abandoned and ice melts. Suffering is everywhere. Rocks and mountains turn to sand. They look a little older every day. Even the celestial bodies paint their pristine passage across the night sky, hurtling into an oblivion somewhere beyond our horizon. Christ comes and goes. The Holocaust echoes forever, quiet and haunting: It is almost invisible. It is inescapable: A cluster of rocks atop a tombstone embeds the horror into the eternity of geologic time. Death approaches, and there is nothing we can do but bear witness. Turn the page again. Loss is overwhelming and imminent, but every photograph is an act of love. In the unblinking stillness of the frame, grief is amplified, and it is rendered beautiful. How else can we face the dread? How else can we transcend it? Against such awesome and indifferent choreography, this is the only meaning — the only antidote — we have. All we can ever hope to possess is love and beauty, forever and for now.

— Stefan Novakovic