HERE I AM. WHERE THE HELL AM I?

RECENT HISTORY

drool. petered out early January this year. Then, because I bought a new camera and wanted to figure out what to do with it, I retooled and restarted it in early April. You see, I use this space to figure photo-stuff out.

But now summer is upon us and I’m going to take a break from blogging. Probably be back the first Sunday after Labour Day.

In the meantime . . . have a swell summer, take ‘er easy, and, conversely, keep your bullshit detectors up and running. There can never be enough critical questioning.

Anyway . . .

HERE I AM. WHERE THE HELL AM I?

Here I am, 11 weeks after I got my FujiFilm X100F and began some completely undefined photo-project. So where the hell am I, anyway?

Let’s get the real geek stuff out of the way first. I quite like this camera. it’s fun and easy to use once you turn all the doodads, auto functions and options off. (The only one I use is aperture-priority auto exposure.) And I love the optical viewfinder (having a real hate on for the way electronic viewfinders separate you from what’s in front of the lens).

The problem, though, is figuring out what I want to actually do with the thing. What do I have to say and how can it help me say it?

Let me tell you a little about my process. (And the X100F certainly makes the first point here darn easy.) . . . .

Go out and take some photos.
Download ’em. (Lightroom)
Root through and, with an open mind, choose the frames that seem like they might be useful.
Turn those ones into TIFFs.
Do a bit of post production on those. (Photoshop)
Slap ’em into a folder called SELECTS.
Every time I add new images I open the folder and choose 6 or 8 or 11 or something images, open them and move ’em around my desktop.
Look for pairs or groups that seem to work together. Or maybe show me relationships, however tenuous, that, for lack of a better word, speak to me.
If I’m lucky I think I maybe see something there. A word pops into my head that, in an abstract way, seems like a key or a clue, or something.
Think I might be getting somewhere.
Change my mind about that whole “maybe I’m getting somewhere” thing.
Repeat.

But there has been progress over the 11 weeks I’ve been working on this. Some of the words that pop into my head, well . . . they stick, they show me possibilities and a way forward. Some of the image combinations make a certain kind of sense to me.

Right now I’m sort of pretty sure I want there to be a dreamlike discord to the work, more open-ended than anything I’ve done for a long time. A series of disparate images that are stuck tentatively together by their own gravity while simultaneously being pulled apart by dark energy. The whole sequence rotating around its own internal logic.

And the word I keep thinking of is desire.