Ng.

Unbelievably, the bird still continues to fascinate. Why would this be a decisive image in some way?

I think what it boils down to is a question of intentions.


On 7th Ave, the sun was at it's highest point. Everything around me was reduced to blinding glare. I could barely open my eyes, people were shoulder to shoulder, and everyone I saw had a glowing halo limning their entire body. I had a moment of realization that this was no different than what I viewed as permissive about night work. If I was visually restrained, so should everyone else be, right? (Ignoring sunglasses and the fact that those facing me on the sidewalk would have actually had the sun slightly at their back.) Aside from this, for the first time I felt the desire to use the camera for a function it's well-made for; as a surrogate organ. This has been a current fascination for me; perhaps it's just that I went to see Cronenberg's The Brood two weeks ago for $7, and using a camera from waist-height always, even when you get used to it, feels odd, as if your navel had grown a pair of eyes. Corrupted.

If I was blind, then so must everyone be; in this state shame is an impossibility.

Which makes shooting aggressively very, very easy.

High noon. Now that one's really obvious. I can't believe I hadn't thought of that.


Tomato Workshop:
A series of projects that function as "creativity stagnation killers."

Tomato doesn't agonize over subject; a characteristic almost unheard of in the design world. Tomato's main guideline, as I understand it, is that the contents of the quotidian can be rigorously collected, interpreted and reinterpreted, removed in layer after layer from their literal translations, and presented.

So a comic strip in which there are as many panels or pages as there are waking hours in a day (not a random day, but that day), but if you can't draw and you want to represent the individual hours as groupings of horizontal lines, or pictures of piles of stones, or cloth dolls... it's all okay.

Photography plays a major part in their process, and is characterized by a swinging between the mundane, presented in perfect Scandinavian deadpan, and what I sometimes view as the European ideal of sophisticated, "open" conceptual work.

Work posing questions over making statements.


I suppose that this came to mind because I always dreamed, as a younger man, to take one of these seminars. I was sure something magical would happen. Now, I wonder if I need the seminar anymore.

All I do now, all day, is figure out ways and reasons to shoot. I had always used the inescapable presence of the quotidian as a permanent, locked reason not to shoot. Everything becomes routine.

But what if that is simply ignored? Treated as irrelevant, even harmful?

I've realized that my personal "opening" to the exterior is laughably basic.
Night? Rain? Doors?
But fixating on these things has given me a body of work from which to cull decency from.

The definition of decency is slid around, for fun, and I suppose, perhaps unconsciously, as a light challenge to the viewer and myself.

This stuff is so rudimentary, I feel slightly embarrassed to even make it public.


Street work has personal value, to me, as a sort of photographic test that I can give myself. And not just as a check box to tic off. I attempt to take singular, selective glimpses into historical photography, often into a single figure. (One of the disadvantages of an introductory photo history course is that the forward march must be maintained, and it's infrequent to see multiple images from the same operator.) But looking at historic work makes certain things obvious. One is that at the beginning of the twentieth century, many things that we identify as being much later innovations were in fact quite common. The atmosphere and trappings change wildly, decade after decade, with one photographic apparatus iteration after another... but the street hasn't been not present as a subject for quite a while now, and the "hand-held" camera was around for a while before Bresson starting lurking around puddles.


Aw, c'mon, who am I kidding? I do it for the danger.