My photographic practice continues to evolve. The more I look at social media, websites, articles, blog posts, newsletter, etc., the more I notice a “sameness.” There is no shortage of tropes, no shortage of cliche, no shortage of copying, no shortage of homage, no shortage of theft, no shortage of repetition. Which is all fine and good… there is nothing new under the sun; good artists copy, great artist steal. I’ve been challenging myself to create work that is not so easily reproducible, not so easy to emulate, not so ready to fall into the long line of trope and cliche. I also realize that this is a futile battle, since every idea that I’ve pursued has certainly been done by someone else, maybe better or worse, but I am certainly not doing anything completely original.
And yet. I’ve been throwing caution to the wind, playing with different lenses, different cameras, different films, and different manners of post-processing-tom-foolery, in hopes that I can satisfy somewhat the hunger for a unique vision that I can wholly own for myself. I’ve also been bridging the film vs digital divide with my current experiments, because it is 2021 after all. There is nothing like taking a pair of scissors and scotch tape to a strip of negatives, even if they end up sitting on my Epson scanner before flying out into the world, via a stream of ones and zeros. Maybe someday I’ll hang these efforts on a wall where a crowd of freely breathing, unmasked humans can wander and stare blankly… but that feels like a fantasy that’s months and months away.
This week, I’ve found inspiration and motivation from a great book I picked up by chance at the library. It’s called “Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950.” It is fueling my curiosity, and making me consider photography in general (and mine specifically) in a larger context. I also stumbled upon a poem by Yeats which really hit home this week, and since it’s public domain, I’ll share it here.
The Second Coming
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”