I was visiting Boston, where I’m from, and returned to Brooklyn with a photo in my phone from that trip. I don’t like to appear in photos; my social anxiety is such that you can read on my face the intervention of something between me and the moment. This is how I feel in most social situations but a group photo ordinarily amplifies this, allows it to break out from my head into my disposition...
...I haven’t been able to stop opening my phone to look at it. I’ve sent it to anyone with a connection to any of the four of us in the photo no matter how loose the threads. Two old bandmates one of whom I lived with for years, one old friend from other bands, all of us having met in school under unremarkable circumstances and at an unknowable moment and are tied together by being in our late thirties and still playing and participating in this scene which for some was maybe something fun for then but not forever. I’m not going to post it here because I really just wanted to try and explain it to the air in front of me and maybe to myself, because I keep opening my phone, because I keep looking at this image, and because this feels as close as I have come in a while to living in a moment rather than struggling against the current in some imagined and already lost future.
This is not to mention the literal room full of faces of people I know or have known over the last fifteen or so years. As I write this sentence another Boston band shouts in my ears “we can’t go back there” so there you go.
To wit, here’s the only image I managed to capture on my phone from that night. This will have been the part of “Woke Up Drunk” where Choke Up cuts their instruments to should “as I roll into the ocean…” which is a moment I live for on the rare occasion I get to experience it.
This isn’t meant to be award-winning insight but I do want to tie this to an image-making-related subject. Recently the definition of fine-art photography was raised a couple of different times due to, let’s say, co-valent events in the little atoms of discussion. It is difficult for me to do other than lean into the intellectually lazy habit of definition by negation or maybe to invoke the Justice Potter “I know it when I see it” fallacy. In my own self-interest I just leave it there and can sort of quietly let myself drift into the realm. A quick web search kind of reveals the specious nature of that approach and exposes me broadside to the harsher truth that maybe there’s more to it than just not being documentary.
Anyway. Here’s some photos from the same night as the aforementioned photo. Big camera, Russian lens, bad light, irresponsible knob-twisting on the settings and just like that we’re painting more than we’re documenting. Easy. Also some links to the bands below.
My output here, with the writing, has diminished significantly after scrapping numerous banked drafts from earlier in the year; ideas that just seemed less interesting when I returned to put on the finishing touches. Hopefully I’ll move forward at a steady if measured pace.
This visit home and the dozens of experiences other than and including what I discussed here felt like a great tension releasing. Creative output is not the logical conclusion to that release but the breathing room it has afforded might make for some more writing on the subject of photography. Don’t quote me on this, though.
Listen to Choke Up or else...
Listen to The New Warden or else...
Listen to Trophy Lungs or else...
Listen to Depressors or else...