Trouble Sleeping
I always seem to have trouble sleeping these days. Don’t know what it is really. Active mind possibly. I was looking at a print I had made earlier in the week or so, possibly last week, my mind doesn’t function well with time these days. It was a roll that I had developed when I was first getting into photography. It clearly shows my lack of understanding of depth of field and aperture relation.
I suppose I printed it because I like the way the light was on it. How it moved through the trees. I then began to think about the magic of it all. It gave me a good bit of pride to realize that I have done everything to it; it was my creation, every last part of it. I crawled down into the dry river bed, I set up the shot, I rook it, and once I found the cassette again, I developed it and then made prints from those negatives. I suppose it’s not in the magic of seeing the print develop on the paper but more of the magic of making everything from start to finish.
I don’t know what drives other people to do what they do in photography, I don’t. I was reading a book lately called Photography A Crash Course and it seems all the young bold photographers either was killed or committed suicide. Not exactly a sobering moment, but it does make one wonder. Or in my case makes you wish you could slap them and say stop being emotional like a poet, their suppose to be all tragic and like wise of that bullshit nature, you are a photographer, snap out of it! But you cant do that. You wish you could but you cant.
I have a lot of thoughts about photography and the way it plays out in my head. Various thoughts of this and that mainly. Late night spend up thinking of if I did this, or that really. Finding a new vocabulary word and finding out what it means and reading up on it, things of that nature, now I’m just petering around with words.
2 comments:
I've thought at length, about the principles behind the beginning of your post, on the act of "creation." For me, it falls into two schools of philosophical thought (classically speaking, not in hubris); that our art is a result of the eddies of predestination and that we are compelled to create what we do just as water is compelled to flow and stars compelled to form and die, or that we are the absolute rulers of the most minute irrelevance: preserving the indivisible creation in our own image. If it's the latter, it's our feeble attempt at Godliness, to create and to judge. In the beginning there was light, and the Photographer saw it, regarded it to the "circular file" and went back to printing. Personally, I'm conflicted, because I like the comfort in the former conceptualization, that absolves us of all responsibility... but the truth is that I believe in the latter, that we attempt to create, to give meaning. Each print is a microcosm of faith in a higher power. If WE can preserve this moment of ourselves, then surely some HIGHER has us so too in mind.
Indeed the latter I fall under as well, it is the act of being about to control, to dominate ones work with that of oneself's own hand. but a tiny piece of me realises that no matter if I have complete control in it I shall leave a part of me in the work, just as with my work at the Journal. Even though the photos I touch up are not my own, once they are touched up there is a sliver of myself represented there. As for the allusion of religion and that of a higher power taking out faith and fate in mind, maybe, maybe not. Surely though we shall see when the time comes.
Its almost a oddity that you should comment today, as I was thinking earlier of email you and checking in on you and seeing what you were up to, I see now you were in deep contemplation of a high meaning in that of art and what compells man. Cheers
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