Family Studies from Home

nothing beats the prespring blues like a lil bit o photographin and driving the parents crazy with the camera.

H

Studies of Grandmom

Since I've been home, I've been collecting these images of my grandmother. I know there is some urgency to catalogue her. But she doesn't feel it. She gets angry that I am taking her wrinkles and immortalizing them, despite my constant pleading that a photograph does not amount the person to their appearance or their identity. That its more about me. 

I hate that I display her sometimes, as a trophy Grandmom--the poet, the art collector, the woman who still works at eighty two, the one who gets me but angers me so much sometimes, because her neuroses get her. 

She's a reminder to live in the present. 

inanimate and high

i've taken a bit of a hiatus from blogging, although I've been maintaining a very regular practice of photographing. I'm stuffed full, but this entry should highlight a bit of what I've been working on personally in my photography.

i always find multiple uses for my pictures--thematically, not in terms of generating revenue, that is.

although many of the following were made in conjunction with an ongoing series of alley images (read: kate smokes a bowl and wanders around capitol hill for a few hours with her camera), i think the images elude to trespassing and spying. aside from the fact that some of these images are the product of trespassing, the more i photograph, the less i feel comfortable with people in the frame. hopefully this is a phase. it always feels as though i am trespassing into their energy--i just get so excited, i tend to undress my subject instead of just pulling on their coattail a bit. its always a bit easier to engage with the remnants of humanity, rather than actual bones and blood.
i suppose the images also elaborate on the superfluous and small nature of humanity--but this is not a new concept for me. in fact, my whole diptychs gallery is about just that.

add

foe favorites from a secret warehouse.

drunk blurry

pinhole

from a year ago, foil pinhole fixed to d700

looking at photographs from a year ago i'm not attached. its easier to see them. 

there is something that happens as a photograher--when my camera is strapped to me, my consciousness changes. its much different to see an image and feel it in my heart then when i see without a frame. without the camera, i can make photographs with the five senses. the mundane feels pertinent. 

but the camera comes towards the eye, it jumps and disconnects itself from its sockets, the cellular railway and the soul. the viewfinder bumps up and the membrane kisses the window and the entirety disappears.

eventually, i would like to feel as though the soul does not change for the camera. i just need to carry the camera everywhere without shooting, so what comes does not just come as the camera calling me to shoot. shooting has always been this way to ground me, but in a way that i was grounded through the camera. I would like to ground the camera through myself as a vessel of whats happening. i would like curiosity to reign without the sense that i will ever be able to understand.

i possess this magnet deep inside their my "someone", and it drives my artistic process. this may be a by-product of the engagement in an inquisitive process that often amounts to art (particularly documentary photography), or maybe this magnet is a reason why i take photos. maybe i have construed this magnet as a defining factor of artist from not artist. the magnet it reaches out from inside my head driven, nagging, overwhelmed, image ridden gut and grabs its polar opposite: the need to understand universal truths. the magnet's persistence to its dire attraction--what words don't explain. photography has been approached as an addiction. i experience this as the incessant need to just get further down the rabbit hole.

but im starting to remember that curiosity does not have to invoke the need to understand. 

its not my job to contribute or add to the world to make it whole. its whole all ready. its my job to understand my role within the whole. gone are the days when we proclaim the value of separating the art from the artist. the artist is the art; the artist is vessel for the whole, which the artist is also part of.

bringing my camera everywhere does not attach my photography to my identity, it breaks the monolith of significance.

fuckin people animals