work in progress
22 Mar
For a while, I could only describe the type of thing that I usually like to photograph as “messes.” I’ll take a photo of anything really, but the stuff that stays on my mind and in my heart is the messy stuff, like the Mission shops and the KZSU interiors. Recently, after looking at the work of Dave Jordano and Zoe Leonard, I’ve realized that it’s not really about messes, but after scale. I like scenes that are on a very human scale, scenes that a viewer feels like they’re standing right in front of. No vistas, no clean or gritty grandeur, just a dense bunch of things within sticking-nose-into range. I love the experience of standing in front of someone’s shelves or a pile of disparate stuff and poking around with my eyes, picking stuff up, turning it over… It’s not the same when it doesn’t feel like a scene you could immediately step into. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with work on smaller and larger scales, but for some reason it never has the same emotional resonance for me.
There’s something very unsatisfying to me the pictured project because I’ve been having a rough time finding the type of visual mess that I like on the scale that I like. The latest batch looks more promising, but let me tell you, the backlog of scans and unprocessed edits is terrifying (speaking of mess!). I think I’m at around 1,300 photos, not including hundreds of scans from the found album of a random 80s band. What with school and the new editing gig, it’s looking grim. Not to mention if I tried to put in enough processing hours to finish off the backlog in a timely fashion I would probably go blind or develop a permanent squint.
Does everyone else try to concentrate on one thing at a time to avoid this mess? Or are there other backlogged souls out there?
