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The month since my last post has been trying - a beginning, in order to re-examine my understanding of self and identity, of comfort and love, of all those things I take for granted, sorrow and joy. A friend once told 
me that he believed there were only two true emotions: joy and sorrow. I'm not sure I believe that, I'm not sure that he would say he does either, but there is something beautiful to me about that statement: that we reside somewhere on that spectrum, dangling somewhere between the two. Both are indecipherable; I lack the ability to clearly know where I am on that spectrum, at least until reflecting back on memories. How intangible and deceiving memory so often is. I find it easier to look back on a period of time as if it were something other than it was in that moment, as if who I am now changes what was then.
Photographs are equally deceiving: they alter the memory of place, time, sound with a two-dimensional representation. A photograph needs to capture pieces of that experience that aren't there, may never even have been. What it then communicates is of course inherently different than the experience; it's instead the reflection of what we as observers bring to it. We infer our own joy or sorrow, sound, smell, and fury.
It occurred to me recently, while hiking around for a job, something that is so easy to overlook but I think
necessary to better communicate a sense of place through a photograph. It's easy for me to be walking along a trail, a city street, a country road, and not turn around or simply veer from the direction that I'm heading. It's simple, and still, easy to forget that everything has a new face from another vantage point. Hunkering low to the ground, climbing up a fire escape, changing a portrait's angle, new light lingering on brick, a mountain ridge coupled by a withered tree; these things bring new stories. You veer off the trail and the same subject tells you something new.
Winter seems like a good time for me to turn around and gain a new perspective. It's easier to pause in the cold, turn around, take in something different than what I would expect. Rather than trying to capture images as I expect them, or clarify where I am on some arbitrary spectrum, this winter I need to try new things, make myself uncomfortable, see and experience a bit differently: personally, professionally, photographically.
I was reading a thread on a photography site recently where someone was requesting advice on how to best approach a new city or environment, capturing the essence of that place and those people's lives. I responded, "I would say that it's necessary to have a general theme. Typically I have an idea, whether it's focusing on the juxtaposition of wealth/ inequality, looking at the architectural development of the place, interactions between socio-economic classes/ races, etc. While this keeps you focused, allow yourself to stray if something impressionable takes place, but having a theme keeps me turning the next street corner with curiosity rather than stranded in a three block radius."
That being said, I realize that I have been relatively established in Asheville six months now and haven't really dedicated much time - if any - to explore Asheville beyond my radius, which usually takes me outside Asheville daily. I often shoot as an excursion, more interested in stories from afar rather than the stories of where I'm living. Even as I write this, I don't believe it's true, that I'm less interested in where I am, but more, that I'm intimidated in the places I'm comfortable.
When Shosha and I were living in Buenos Aires, I felt curious and excited to be somewhere in the city with intentionality, exploring something so foreign to me even as the city had begun to feel common with my daily routines. And still, I felt constantly intimidated by something else, by being seen as trespassing on a different culture. I was concerned with seeming patronizing behind my lens. And honestly, I was especially concerned with having my camera stolen (we were mugged soon before we left).
In March 2007, I went to a protest where Hugo Chavez was speaking at the same time Bush held a meeting in Plata del Mar over some trade agreements with Argentina. As we were entering the converted futbol stadium, I turned around and took a picture of two boys behind us. One was facing down but looking at the camera; he seemed angry. Over his shoulder, another boy was looking up, and it's his face that I can't really gather. There's surprise, but there's also something else on his face that I've never really been able to put my finger on.
Something about that photograph always intimidated - and intimidates - me about shooting people. On the one hand, there's seemingly overt aggression, which I'd like to believe has nothing to do with me and my camera. And on the other hand, there's an expression that's more subtle but confusing, and in that, is similarly disconcerting. Both stories are honest, and that's what I love to see conveyed in an image, and that's what I'm similarly intimidated by, because in every point on the spectrum between the two, I can never decide where I fit in. As a photographer, I'm conveying something about my space and time, but not something intrinsic about me or the subject. Radiohead's Thom Yorke sums it up well:
There's a gap in betweenThere's a gap where we meetWhere I end and you begin
I recently got to see a friend who's a brilliant visual artist that - even though she can produce just about anything she wants - simply uses pens now with a particular, unique, Southern-gothic theme and style. We hadn't seen each other in nearly six months; it seems that happens more and more now the farther out I get from college with most people.
In college, everything was so laid out and easy for lives to blend together seamlessly. Regardless of what we studied, our communities had a central-point, and we each experienced similar things, had common goals and complications. And especially in Charleston, social circles were incestuous, and it was impossible to really go anonymously on the street for more than a few days.
So I met my friend up at this restaurant and started talking art and photography and found myself exploring questions about why I shoot and - as importantly - why I shoot what I shoot.
The person I consider my mentor recently contacted me to see if I'd maybe be interested in starting to shoot more professionally, doing events and weddings. I think that before I actually started taking photographs - and especially before I shot my best friend's wedding this Spring in PA - I would never have considered it as something I'd be interested in. But because of that wedding, I realized that there are so many more scenes to capture photographically than I'd previously given credit in the events and rituals of our lives.
For instance, at Jeff's wedding, I could work behind the scenes, not doing the standard wedding thing but trying to eye it more from a photojournalist's perspective, seeing the communal dynamics playing out around this one event. People come together, in celebration, typically (though there are those few that want to make it about them). And that's the story, seeing the reaction of this event on the faces of people who matter to the couple.
And in some ways, these events aren't completely about the couple themselves; the couple is what brings together the array of family-quarrels, the lover's hanging up their spurs, the friends they haven't seen in years and the ones they saw last week. The couple is the conduit for stories to be brought to light in a forum that never would have happened without them. They're mirrors, reflecting the people they love, the ones they feel complicated about, and those they felt obligated to invite.
What it takes then, is for the photographer to turn around and find these stories coming out. We can find a story in everything. I was telling my artist friend about a small tool-shed that I pass everyday on the way to work. It's sheltered into the side of a hill that's being overrun with kudzu vines, and they've also started taking over the exterior of the shed. This shed's probably been there 20, 30, 40 years maybe, and in that single image, there's a story about Appalachian America that needs to be told. So maybe next time I post, I'll stop doing the Torres del Paine pictures and have that one instead.
I do this online podcast thing where you shoot based on a particular theme and then submit a photograph into a pool for viewing and maybe you'll win a book or something. Generally I don't actually get around to shooting that particular theme until its time for the next theme and then I can't compete. So yesterday, I felt really proud of myself for taking the initiative and setting up a composed shot about 'gear' where I had hung an orange jumpsuit (like the ones prisoners wear) in a window, backdropped by really lovely afternoon light and a number of objects like a shovel draped with a cobweb and a dirtied hat.
I was thinking of a photograph from a few years ago in National Geographic covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina where a child's soiled, Sunday shirt with a tie next to a soiled blue blazer were hanging in the remains of someone's home, hanging "to show how quickly life can change," the caption read. It wasn't going to be amazing, but I was excited because I don't usually think about photography in a staged way; I usually walk around and come upon something.
I lack a degree of intentionality in that I guess. I'm not really the person who constructs things and experiences in their mind, but more someone who observes. I don't create in an extremely conscious way, I don't have that burn to always say something with intentionality through art. Usually I play with vague ideas or concepts, play with words in a poem, and through the process of tinkering, I find something useful that is of - I hope - great depth, and not with that great intention, but through the process of finding it and identifying it.
So back to my story: I took out my camera after staging this scene in the spare bedroom and turned it on. Everything seemed fine, I focused and shot; the exposure was way too long, having shot candles a few nights ago. I turned the command dial to change the shutter speed and - dun dun dun - nothing happened. And then again with aperture-priority, nothing. The camera won't do its primary function. Needless to say, I'm a little freaked out.
So I spent 40 minutes on the phone with Nikon today (25 of which were holding to the most god-awful music), and I have to send it in... send it in to Nikon, not known for great customer turn-around, during the most photographically important month in Western North Carolina. My favorite time of year and I may not have my primary camera. Hell, I don't even have a secondary. Oh the horror.
But then, some days you just have to smile, say serenity, and - even in those simple ways - let the changes come.
The month since my last post has been trying - a beginning, in order to re-examine my understanding of self and identity, of comfort and love, of all those things I take for granted, sorrow and joy. A friend once told 
me that he believed there were only two true emotions: joy and sorrow. I'm not sure I believe that, I'm not sure that he would say he does either, but there is something beautiful to me about that statement: that we reside somewhere on that spectrum, dangling somewhere between the two. Both are indecipherable; I lack the ability to clearly know where I am on that spectrum, at least until reflecting back on memories. How intangible and deceiving memory so often is. I find it easier to look back on a period of time as if it were something other than it was in that moment, as if who I am now changes what was then.
Photographs are equally deceiving: they alter the memory of place, time, sound with a two-dimensional representation. A photograph needs to capture pieces of that experience that aren't there, may never even have been. What it then communicates is of course inherently different than the experience; it's instead the reflection of what we as observers bring to it. We infer our own joy or sorrow, sound, smell, and fury.
necessary to better communicate a sense of place through a photograph. It's easy for me to be walking along a trail, a city street, a country road, and not turn around or simply veer from the direction that I'm heading. It's simple, and still, easy to forget that everything has a new face from another vantage point. Hunkering low to the ground, climbing up a fire escape, changing a portrait's angle, new light lingering on brick, a mountain ridge coupled by a withered tree; these things bring new stories. You veer off the trail and the same subject tells you something new.
Winter seems like a good time for me to turn around and gain a new perspective. It's easier to pause in the cold, turn around, take in something different than what I would expect. Rather than trying to capture images as I expect them, or clarify where I am on some arbitrary spectrum, this winter I need to try new things, make myself uncomfortable, see and experience a bit differently: personally, professionally, photographically.
