A while ago I was supposed to note here that I don’t live in Florida anymore. I’ve taken a job in Dallas for the time being. It’s a nice good job, though it’s not teaching, nor related to my career interests. It’s a means to an end, which is satisfying. I don’t know any one here yet; I don’t have my bike with me, yet. I’m doing the best with my literal feet, getting on my figurative feet, and as far as my photographic work there aren’t any “Big Stories” that I’m working on. I have been keeping a diary of sorts, it’s the most I can do, creatively, having no story to tell but my own.
Often I feel high and low, and in between I might take a picture. But as a diary nothing is really “building.” I feel like these images are very isolated from one another, in fact they’re more like artifacts of the days being crossed off.
I’ve always felt that a determined collection of something small will later be relevant. That is, when you have enough of them, that’s when the second, more enlightening half of your work begins.
When I first started taking pictures, they were bad, but I knew that I wanted to mediate my experience in this way. It was when I was living in China in 2006 that I really started interacting with my camera (a plastic, half-broken point and shoot). For a few months I went around Beijing exploring and trying to tell a story on my blog. But eventually, I came to an impasse, photographically. The idea that my pictures were bad, but my ideas were pretty good occurred to me; and I looked for other photographers from whom who I could steal working methods. I titled one early post, Density, referring to the photographic work of Michael Wolf, specifically his collection of high-density Hong Kong apartments. In the post I ruminated on the basic exercise of finding a daily, simple thing to make pictures of. For me, this worked, I really developed and the picture taking became a lot more rewarding.
Now, this exercise is more apart of how I exist in the world. It keeps me taking pictures, even if rather than simple things I’m trying to make a picture that is emotive and complex. The goal is to develop even when there is seemingly nothing to say.