a second facet, if you will

and you'd better (film from the woods, 2022)

Having been throughout my life forewarned, reminded, and nagged on the interconnectedness of everything to everything else, it was difficult to revisit these photos shot in early 2022 with their sparing detail and do other than find ways to tow them through into the crush of the present.

Whereas it has thus far been mostly digital and monochrome (and frankly punished) photos of people holding instruments; Whereas I am however unwillingly made to feel some near-paternal impulse to nurture an insecurity regarding my art making, my competence, cleverness, motivation, and on and on; Whereas the economic system which permeates us down to the psyche would have us self-disclose every last facet of worth…

I have to put these up here. To prove, to myself I guess, that I have and can and will. That I can shoot in any capacity. Except professionally of course. And duh.

So what is the purpose of this group of photos? Why did I shoot them when I did? Why did I let them sit for so long in the limbo of logical block addresses on two different hard drives? What do they mean now that they’re here? I am not likely to have the answers but they’re good questions right?

I promise: this is better than me talking about sliders in Lightroom every time. Something I’m not insecure about is the ethics or not of photo editing software. It’s not why I’m here. For what it’s worth, short of massaging the curve a little bit and some sparing dehazing there wasn’t much here that I needed to alter.

It took a few days to recall which camera I used and I’m still not sure it’s correct to say this was shot on a Yashica A which I have since sold. I know this was Portra 800 because I bothered to write that down. I don’t really have color film allegiances so disabuse yourself that this was anything more than what was probably available in the wake of the COVID-film photography bubble.

I know I had no light meter with me and was relying on a phone app and my best guesses, but the all-encompassing fog rendered everything into middle grey. Fogarithmic, if you like funny funny jokes. I sure know I do.

I don’t think the photos here communicate very much at all outwardly beyond translating some aspect of my perspective on the natural world. I do think that I will refer back to these shots when I feel certain emotions. In fact I find that to be a pretty common function of my photographic practice which proves to me that this practice is very often for myself first and not problematically engaged in under some kind of duress. “I can stop anytime I want…I just don’t want to!”

I think I have felt the emotion before which has no word or collection of words I could attribute to it, but which is translated with strange fluency by the image of the...utility building??...swimming in this formless vapor anchored seemingly to the very edge of the frame and possibly to nowhere else.

This nameless feeling is absolutely communicated in lots of other band images I have made, but with a human subject screaming and holding an instrument there is so much vocabulary insinuated and so it feels more like engaging in a formal (if abstract) translation.

I’m going to wrap this up here because of the disproportion of words to images and the mission of this post long since complete, but in the absence of the noise of social media I’ve been enjoying letting my inner monologue return to where it was maybe five years ago and I appreciate anyone bearing with these run-on missives.

I’m going to compile a couple of little collections from my phone again soon and I’ll have another set of music photos from a very cool screamo festival filled with friends. Otherwise the agenda is to continue to shoot and occasionally pull stuff off the hard drives which either haven’t ever been examined seriously or haven’t seen the light of day in a long time.

fuck, dude. *gestures broadly at most things*