Jason and the Golden Fleece — The Argonautica

Odessa, Georgia, Istanbul — 2012–2018

According to the Roman historian Appian, the voyage of the Argonauts was not myth but memory. The Golden Fleece, he argued, was no fantasy — it was sheepskin. Ancient gold washers in the rivers of Colchis, in what is now Georgia, stretched wool across the current to catch flecks of gold suspended in the water. The tiny nuggets would lodge themselves in the fleece, and a legend was born. Geological research at the Institute of Geology in Tbilisi has since confirmed that gold sands did exist in Svaneti, in the Greater Caucasus, and that the rivers were mined exactly this way.

This series began in the summer of 2012 in Odessa, Ukraine, and came to a close in June 2018 in Istanbul, Turkey — two cities on the same ancient sea that Jason once crossed. It is a deeply personal and intimate project, less concerned with the myth as literature than with what the myth points toward: the human need to search for something rare and elusive, to cross difficult terrain in pursuit of a thing that may turn out to be far more ordinary, and far more beautiful, than imagined.

The photographs move between the epic and the quietly observed. A girl sits by the Black Sea, drawing. Football posts stand empty against an alpine sky in Georgia. Shadows fall across an arcade in Istanbul. Stone, smoke, ruins, a life ring on a wall. The Caucasus mountains rise and disappear into cloud. Nothing announces itself as mythological — and yet the myth is present in every frame, in the searching figures and the abandoned spaces, in landscapes that feel simultaneously ancient and utterly now.

The Golden Fleece was real. It was wool, and rivers, and patience. So, perhaps, is this.