The Price of Gold, 2010 from Gwynne Johnson on Vimeo.

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The Price of Gold, 2010, video, 4:36 minutes

The Price of Gold is an exploration of inconclusive endings and parent/child
dynamics. While using the specifics of father, this work oscillates between a singular personal history
and broader experiences of the father.

The video is comprised of screen captures of every Google Maps still photograph from my apartment on
the north side of Chicago to an address where my father lived on the south side of Chicago in the mid-1950’s.
Accompanying the photographs are audio fragments of a narrator reading from letters my father wrote to me in
the years preceding his death.

The tensions and disjunctions in the letters’ contents are mirrored in the video’s fragmented temporalities: the time of me living on
the north side of Chicago, the time of my father living on the south side, the time of the Google Maps photographs,
the time of the letter writing, and the time in the video where they all overlap, simultaneously meeting yet remaining
very distant. In this sense the video functions as the surface of a photograph, it is a conflation and collapsing of
space and time. It is an impossibility.