What do images say when they are paired together? Maybe nothing special. Maybe something extraordinary.
2020: 34 (Words, Meaning, Titles, Thoughts, Feelings, etc.)
Words appear and float through my mind… and then disappear. Photography is obviously a visual medium, but I have noticed that words creep into my images. They always have. Subconscious manifestations or reactions. Found poetry. Found typography. Riddles to be solved. Statements to contemplate. Whispers from someone, unseen. Messages from forces unimaginable. Language, understood. Languages unfamiliar and unknown to me. A confusion of tongues. Contemplating the Tower of Babel.
A photo friend shared an intriguing text written by Frederick Sommer this week. This passage stuck with me:
“Words represent images:
nothing can be said for which there is no image.
Linkages between images exist a priori
and are the logic of display.
Linkages between words are the logic of grammar.
Images can be named; linkages can only be displayed.
Images and their linkages are states of affairs.
Words and their linkages are propositions.
Words occupy language structure as display of grammar:
what can be said can be seen as represented image.”
I often have titles bouncing around in my head. Titles for upcoming books or zines or other projects. I love book titles, sonfg and album titles, names of movies, names of poems. I like to make references through my photo work via titles. Maybe an obscure reference to an obscure indie rock band from the 90s. Maybe an obscure quote from an English poet that I don’t know much about. A line from Dante’s Inferno, a title from a song by The Cure. All fodder for me to play with. To bring context to a series of images. I may be a language charlatan, so sue me.
Here’s a list of titles for works yet to come:
A Year in the Cathedral
Anticipation of a Future Danger
A Century of Slang
Pictures of a Floating World
Status Quo
On The Verge of Mayhem
In Between Days
Broadway the Hard Way
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
Travels With Fellini
Lost Summer
2019:52 (Turning A Page)
At the beginning of 2019, I made a list of things I wanted to accomplish in the coming year. Most folks make resolutions, but I realized that that was too firm of a demand on my own accountability. The word “goals” was much more palatable for me, and though some goals went unrealized, I was able to reach a few on my list. One of my goals is being fully realized with the writing of this specific post.
I wanted to post to my blog, once a week, every week, for the entire year. I do see the degree of absurdity in maintaining a blog of any sort in the last year of this crazy decade. I cut my internet teeth in decades past, and was consumed by the great blogging crazy of the mid-aughts. But as the years flew by, and I began to take my photographic work more seriously (which included creating this website about five years ago) I realized the value of having a repository for my thoughts here, as opposed to succumbing completely to the whims of the social media platforms I detest but can’t seem to ignore or abandon completely.
Speaking of social media… I keep coming close to deleting my Facebook account, but I realize that it is the only way I stay connected with a certain number of important people in my life. I also admit that I would not be as culturally, politically, or social aware of broad trends if I was not on the privacy and soul sucking entity that is Facebook. However, with the demise of the Latent Image Collective, I had one less excuse to jump on the platform. Still, out of boredom, mostly, I still find myself scrolling through the virtual lives of people that I only virtually know, peppering my feed with “likes” or “loves.” I don’t know what the value is, really. I convince myself that it is a necessary evil, and that I need to be on Facebook in order to bring my creative work to as wide an audience as possible, including those rare but appreciated folks who opened their wallets to financial support my books and exhibits this past year. But I still drift away and back again, and I suspect that at some point I may take the drastic step of having my wife change my password so I can’t log in every freaking day. I also continue to wrestle with Instagram, but somehow rationalize it’s use because it is a photo-based platform. But the chasing of ‘likes” gets so tiring after a while, and I need to be able to see the value in my own work without the need of constant, external validation, most of which means nothing more than catching the eye of a few dozen scrollers. Resolution of this issue is TBD.
One of the benefits of a weekly posting on my blog has been that I can remember where my brain was at different points in the year. It was a nice exercise in pondering my work, my interests, my travel, my book purchases, my book publishing, my exhibitions, my health, my successes, my failures, my moments of joy, my moments of pain and sadness. There’s been plenty of all of it. Such is life. It also gives me a sense of achievement to know I was able to keep up this challenge for a full year… though some weeks were a struggle to come up with something relevant to share. Other weeks I felt like I was sharing too much of myself, but I wanted to take this exercise seriously. And I wanted to be honest, truthful, earnest when I posted. I fear the world lacks this kind of revealing of one’s real thoughts and feelings. The perfectly curated life on social media is damaging to our collective psyche, and I hope that some of ramblings here have shown someone (anyone) else that it’s ok to share your thoughts in this manner. Which leads me to yet another question. Who actually reads these posts of mine? I do see that there has been an uptick in traffic to my website via this blog, but I have no idea who you are, what you think, or even why you came to this site to begin with. I am grateful for any attention given to my photos and my words, but this exercise is still a selfish one, and I think regardless of who sets their eyes on it, I must continue to try to find a way to express myself. This blog will most likely continue into 2020… I’m not sure if it will be weekly, I’m not sure if it will be a quasi-diary, or what else it might entail.
I am happy to have had the opportunity to show my photos in several exhibitions this year. I am especially proud of sharing the walls at UNM with my four compatriots from the Tuesday Night Photobook Nerds hangout that happens every week at the High and Dry Brewery. The friendship and support I get from these gatherings have sustained me through some rocky moments over the past twelve months. I was also very proud of the “River, Ocean, Sea” exhibition that I shared with Fabio and Hean Kuan in the late summer here in Albuquerque. It was a fitting swansong for my time in the Latent Image Collective, and it was a true manifestation of the collaborative spirit that brought the group together in the first place. Lastly, my year was bookended by having my photos shown in Naples, Italy, at the Magazzini Fotografici. It was a dream of mine to have my work shown internationally, and it was so satisfying to have that dream realized.
The year is ending, and so is the decade. There has been so much tumult in the world, I can only hope that sanity and love can overcome the wave after wave of pain, hatred, war, division and death that seems to be in abundance lately. I am also aware that the world will continue on its path regardless of my input or concern, but that will not prevent me from trying to bring goodness, joy, love and art into it. I’ve embraced the existential aspects of my personality with gusto this year. I’ve experienced moments of transcendence, and also moments of extreme darkness. But I also learned lessons that will carry me forward, to enlighten my path, and to inspire me to keep creating. While I breathe, there is hope.
Thank you for spending time with me here over the past twelve months.
The Fertile Void
The past month or so has been a time of in-between activities for me. A pause. A deep breath. Things in the past have the dust finally settling. Solid things on the horizon seem at a comfortable distance. Now has been a time of tinkering, playing, testing out new ideas. Trying different formats to shoot with, new ways of presenting my work, new methods for making photographs.
I have a disposition to get bored easily. When given just a small amount of "too much time on my hands" I can easily slide into ennui. I become impatient, I think that I'm wasting time, squandering a precious resource. I am trying to be at ease with these moments, to embrace the lower hum of obligations and expectations. In regards to my personal artwork, I am using this time to try new things that may or may not inform future projects.
There are a variety of interpretations or definitions for the idea of "The Fertile Void." I like to think of it as that time in between, when nothing can become something. When the "pause" is an undefined first step in the "next thing."
Words to Ponder
My photos, above. Not my words, below.
“Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory. The writer has time to reflect. He can accept and reject, accept again; and before committing his thoughts to paper he is able to tie the several relevant elements together. There is also a period when his brain “forgets,” and his subconscious works on classifying his thoughts. But for photographers, what has gone, has gone forever. From that fact stem the anxieties and strength of our profession.”