Shooting Wide Open

There’s nothing like the feeling of being content with a newly processed photo. Even if you know that by next week you will probably have changed your mind.

The Yellowstone trip was fruitful in unexpected ways. It turned out to be a very fun group of people, and much silliness occurred. Almost all of the photos I like happen to be from a little town called Buhl in Idaho, where we also found an empty stone grain silo in which we proceeded to stage a sound art piece. More on that as soon we figure how to distribute audio files for processing. Suffice it to say, the reverb was incredible. If you’ve ever heard of crazy sound engineers suspending speakers in wells (“wellverb“) or Radiohead recording “Exit Music” in a big stone castle… now I understand why.

Get out those band photos. And the Irony.

Classes are over, portfolios are turned in. A list of my own – tentative summer plans:

- rock the Yellowstone hotspot
- work in school photo lab
- use grant to shoot
- process backlog
- install better website template (get Fusion! found album together too?)
- pick up a little Max
- go to World Expo

!

So for now once again I leave you to the WordPress bot.

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I’m tired of photographer interviews. The thing I start missing when people talk about photography and especially many of the more documentary oriented projects that I’m attracted to is any discussion of their creative process in terms of affect. So I’ve been reading interviews with PJ Harvey, and in this one with Pitchfork, she says something about process and lulls in creativity that I find reassuring and true:

I’ve never thought of it as writers’ block, but I definitely have periods of greater or lesser activity. I think that’s pretty natural. The key is not to panic when you’re in one of the troughs of creativity. Because that’s so valuable, there’s so much learning to be done in that. In the moment, I feel like I’m in that space. It’s not resting, it’s almost like treading water and gathering information and trusting that it will come around again, and it will. I see it on a greater scale with projects, really. I think that’s completely natural. Sometimes you see artists burning very brightly, and they’ll have three or four projects in a row that are absolutely incredible. But I think it’s very hard for anyone to sustain that time after time after time. Some people do, but they burn out quite quickly. Or they die or something. [laughs] But in lots of artists that I admire, I see the peaks and troughs that [they] move through.

The first time that I felt bereft of any inspiration I may have panicked, but when you’ve been writing for 15 or 16 years, like I have, I trust in it now, I know that whatever it is that comes through me– this desire to make the work that I do, it’s there, it will be there no matter what. Even if I tried to beat it off with a shovel, it would still come back. I don’t worry at those times. I just know that it will be back.

It becomes something that I trust will be there, and all I have to do is let it be there. There’s no separation, really, between living and creativity. I don’t think there is. Sometimes people will say “Where do get your ideas from?” and it’s just life, it’s just breathing. The key is being open to that moment, and then there’s a wealth of inspiration.

In an interview with Laura Hird, what she says about dark music not necessarily being indicative of a dark personal attitude mirrors what she says in the PF interview about the work not necessarily reflecting on the creator’s personal life. For me that’s exactly what I want – some emotive impact without the bleeding heart exhibitionism. Much of art is translation of experience, sometimes alien or extreme experience, isn’t it? (I have David Lewis’ bat example on the brain for some reason – the problem of other bat minds?)

I really like that push and pull you get between the dark subject matter and the beautiful melodies that are flying around in there, which are quite uplifting, so I never feel particularly dragged down by the record. I always feel quite uplifted really, quite comforted.

One doesn’t have to be suffering to show suffering, you can orchestrate that. And I think in some ways when you’re not suffering yourself, you can present it in a much clearer way because you have that perspective, stepping back and looking at it. A lot of the people I find funniest to be around are people whose work can be very dark. It doesn’t mean that they’re dark people at all, it just means they have a certain sensitivity or a certain insight in being able to present that.

I read a wonderful quote by Leonard Cohen not long ago where he was talking about how sad songs mean so much to people because everybody suffers defeat in their lives in some way, whether it’s they didn’t get the job they wanted, or when you’re younger you imagine all these things about how your life’s going to turn out and ultimately that doesn’t happen to anybody, and so a sad song is incredibly touching because it connects us all to that sense of loss in some way.

I took a short 3D imaging workshop, and I’m keen on getting a stereo Holga. I’ve never been a fan of the Holga aesthetic but there’s something so sharp and delineated about most of my work that it’s frustratingly devoid of emotion in some way. I suppose lo-fi is an easy way out, but sometimes all you can hope for is a starting point.

I think particularly with instruments that I’m unfamiliar with, I can’t use my intellect to play that instrument because I don’t know how to apply it. And so it does all become about emotional response, and that’s often very naïve and child-like, and I use that to my advantage. I’ll often purposefully go to instruments that I don’t know anything about just to access that place.

A bit of gear and non-art chat today…

Last quarter while I was taking the view camera class, I went shooting with a friend who shoots 8×10 and saw him using an orange (Wratten #90?) filter viewer to previsualize black and white. This week I saw one in the used division of my local camera shop and considering the pain of switching back to visualizing black and white after shooting so much color for so long, I decided to get it. There were a couple of other darker viewers, and while googling what their function, I came upon the Roger Deakins forum, where apparently the Roger Deakins himself answers questions about equipment and techniques on a fairly regular basis.

I have a hard time believing this is real, but after googling around, it seems that at some point, there was a forum frequented by Deakins which shut down after a bit of abusive trolling by one individual. I’m not sure if this forum is a reincarnation (hence the 2 in the URL?) – can anyone confirm or deny? Seems too good to be true, though his comments don’t seem to be all that extensive…

Laura Volkerding’s Solomon’s Temple

The photos in this book are pretty low contrast, and I had to resist a natural urge to ramp it up. One of my classmates from the view camera course saw the KZSU workspaces and recommended Volkerding.

Speaking of KZSU, this is the time of year when a bunch of short shows go up in a few spaces, and I’ve put a selection of photos in the lobby of the Cummings art building on campus for this week. They’re coming down on Friday, so not a lot of time to hop on over, but what can say… if you’re nearby, find an excuse. Do you hear one of those annoying clearance sale TV ads in your head? (“FOR ONE WEEK ONLY…!!!”)

I’m showing 10 of my KZSU shots at An Art Affair, which runs through the end of the day Saturday. If you’re on campus, come by the White Plaza tents and check it out. All of them are 17×22″ and I’m especially proud of this one. The web doesn’t do it justice!

Last quarter we did blogs for the light class and one of the more interesting videos posted was this one, of some pretty complex stop-action art.

(Thanks, Susan!)

This quarter I’m taking some great classes. Alternative Processes, where we’ll be making cyanotypes, Van Dyke, palladium and gum prints, among other things. The Photo Book, which is the perfect opportunity to make a final object of the radio station photos – I’m thinking something serial and semi-informal (with a web supplement?). A projects seminar, which I’m taking as impetus to get more shooting done on the Mission stuff. Film history from 1960 onward – great excuse to watch Mulholland Drive again, though I’m not sure what to make of the fact that Groundhog’s Day is one of the recommended films, heh heh. And last, an art and science class that focuses on addressing environmental issues with art and culminates in a 2 week roadtrip to Yellowstone.

I’m also taking a beginning singing class. I’ve had this itch to sing in public for a while but the nerves are something else. We’ll see how much croaking in front of people I can withstand before imploding. God forbid I don’t hone my vocal skills in time to serenade the bison on the plain though…

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?