Category: OPINION

HAUNTED

I’m haunted by questions about why I’ve started this blog up again. Wondering if I’ll just pick up where I left off three years ago, or if I should use this opportunity to dramatically change the tone of the thing.

Fucked if I know. I suppose that these questions will get worked out by the doing. After all, that’s how most stuff gets worked out . . . by applying yourself to the problem.

Path (click on images to enlarge)

One thing I do know is that we are all pretty much stuck, struck, confined and bound by certain in-born proclivities. Sure, we change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Evolution/devolution makes sense to me, so does the idea that every so often things (including us) go through radical, seismic changes.

And so it goes . . .

Mississippi River

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IF YOU WANT TO CALL YOURSELF A PHOTOGRAPHER . . .

Last week I postulated that, for me, photography is about process, growing, learning. I understand that there are other reasons folks take pictures, one of the main ones being to record an event. (Though these days the good-old record-an-event approach is more often than not tied in with the let’s-post-this-to-show-friends-my-charmed-life thing. And we all know that when photos are meant to be used as public relations it tends to shift the motivation for their creation.)

If you set out to record aspects of your life that you think are interesting, and if you want to share those images, I got no beef with that. We all do it. But if you want to call yourself a photographer, if you want to hone and learn from your practice, the only person you should be trying to impress is yourself. And you shouldn’t be too easily impressed, either.
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THE FUTURE

I’m trying to photograph the future. That’s my current project. It’s out there, the future is.

Here are a couple of quotes from author William Gibson, whose book The Peripheral has inspired and informed this project:

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

“When people write imaginary futures, they’re never about the future. They can only be about the moment in which they were written, and the known history before that. We don’t have anything else.”

I’m not going to go into any real detail about THE FUTURE right now. Over time I’ll dribble (or is that: drool?) out more bits and pieces of this puzzle as they occur to me. But I do want to say that I have noticed that this is the first project I’ve done which embraces all three forms of shooting which I seem to be interested in. Namely: portrait, landscape and street. How all these will mesh together remains, like the future, to be seen.

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I welcome your comments. No vitriol please, but contrary opinions and insights are welcome.

HELLO (AGAIN)

Back in the olden days (that’d be circa two thousand and six) photoblogs were the coming thing. If you were a photographer and didn’t have a blog you were dead in the water or something, or so the thinking went. Many photographers started a blog and most of those blogs petered out after a couple of posts. My blog, drool, persisted, from the first post on August 11, 2006 to the last on September 14, 2014, when I called it quits.

Rearview mirror (looking forward, looking back), California

These days Facebook, Instagram and other short-form social media platforms have pretty much supplanted long-form thinking in the FotoWorld™. But for some reason I’ve decided to resurrect drool, even though I’m not sure if I can keep it up (or, indeed, even get it up).

Like before, I intend to post every Sunday. Let’s see what happens.

Read on . . .

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DISCOVERY

One of the main reasons I photograph is to learn about that which I’m photographing (the subject). I spend a lot of time (and emotion) on my personal projects and they are all aimed at subject matter that I’m both interested in and want to gain more understanding of. The point of doing it, for me, is discovery. (Well, that, and getting out of the house.)

Spending a lot of time on a project allows the subject to seep into me and colour my reactions. The pictures show me my reactions and, thus, I learn. That is not to say I don’t have my own aesthetic proclivities, my own opinions. I do. And those, too, seep into my work.

But the world is so multi-faceted that it just seems silly to approach any subject in a categorical way. When you merely execute a plan to arrive at a foregone conclusion you discover nothing.
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THE PAST

This was the very first drool post, titled, of course, FIRST POST.

FIRST POST
august 11, 2006

Some people tell me I’m funny.

EXAMPLE:
Me: “Do you think we should move over there?
Some people: “You’re funny.”
Me: “But I only said ‘Do you think we should move over there?’”
Some people: “It’s the way you said it.”

Funny, I guess.

I never really got it (being funny) until I met Christina, my assistant. I’m pretty sure that she’s funny the way I’m funny . . . just the way she says stuff makes me laugh. Now I get it: funny.

I think I might be a lot less funny now. But I suppose that’s not really up to me to decide.

Anyway, it seems somehow fitting that Christina would also figure in this first post of resurrected drool. After all, besides my direct family, she’s probably the person I feel closest to. I hope I don’t sound too maudlin (see, I’m less funny) when I say she’s like the daughter I never had; and I swell up inside when she tells me I’m her number two dad.

Now where was I? Christina.

Straylight Press (my publishing company) published her first book, Back to me, a few years ago. Now she’s back in town (visiting from Cali, where she’s lived for a bunch of years) and we’re working on her second book, titled Born. About her first year as a mother.

Yes, more info/hype will be appearing here as the project progresses, but for now . . .

Christina and Gus
Christina and Stephane, our print rep

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FINALLY

I’ve taken up gardening. Here are some of my poppies . . .

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I welcome your comments. No vitriol please, but contrary opinions and insights are welcome. (As well as bugs and typos.)
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Please note: This iteration of drool is using a different template from the previous drool posts. As a result the formatting of the previous posts is a bit messed up.
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