On starting projects
Trona, Mojave, CA
Fridays Rainshadow
Imperial Sand Dunes, AZ.
The Deserving Oasis.
Photography projects tend to begin in many different ways. My Friday’s Rainshadow started by sheer chance after a trip to the Mojave Desert where I just happened to have a 617 camera I was trying out. The panoramic format added a new dimension to the images and gave me a different way of looking at the landscape. For part two of the project, The Deserving Oasis- an exploration of the Sonoran Desert, things have been a little less straight forward. Like a writers second book deal, there is more pressure and higher expectations, especially after obtaining a grant/ advance. One issue I have encountered is the feeling of the work is not good enough. With the Rainshadow work, It didn’t really matter at first what the images were of, in fact I spent six months shooting work I would never show, it was all over the place.
Projects always take time to develop and mature and it is only when we revisit places over and over that we start to see patterns develop and a vernacular is created. Its certainly not something that can be done in a day. From past experience I am pretty sure I will feel differently after more time spent in the heat.
In this day and age people always want things finished so fast which I find quite sad. A sense of urgency Is never a good thing.
Who doesn’t like nostalgia?
Grannie McGregor. 100th Birthday.
It is safe to say that the older we become the more nostalgia fills our everyday.
Personally I love nostalgia and often wonder how I could photograph nostalgia without the passing of time.
It’s hard to imaging what early pioneers like Stephen Shore were feeling when then photographed a 1970’s Cadillac, in the 70’s. It certainly wasn’t nostalgia. If we did know what would resonate nostalgia later in life, then we would all know the future and then some.
In photography nostalgia often gets a bad rap, whether choosing to shoot film just because you like the way it looks (nostalgic), or by using a digital sepia filter app in an attempt to recreate some past experience- like when your grandfather wore a suit during a visit to the beach.
We may not be able to look into the future, but we can certainly look into the past, albeit with rose tinted vintage spectacles.
Despite making my first photographs some 40 years ago, I still do not consider any of those early attempts as being nostalgic. Even the image I made of my Grannie MacGregor on her 100th birthday (when I was just 15 years old) doesn’t really resonate a warm fuzzy sense of well being, to me she just looks old.
The Importance of bad photography.
It all begins with an idea.
A day by the river. Cumbria, UK 1976
Never is a photograph more important than after the death of a loved one. Those forgotten family outings in the form of faded album snaps can suddenly become precious, although the idea of the family album has now been replaced with this thing called iPhoto.
It was this necessity of having a photograph of a loved one for the fear of forgetting them that drove the photography market back in the mid 1850’s. The only difference today is that those finely detailed mirrors with memory, the daguerreotype, have been replaced with digital screen savers.
After the death of my father, even as a photographer, I wish I had made more photographs of him, in particular more photographs of us together.
Of course, even without a photograph, we do not forget, but still, the importance of photography at helping us to remember has been with us for 180 years. What intrigues me is that this kind of photography never has to be considered any good. In fact it could be the worst image ever made because it’s all about content, and not the actual photograph. As long as it bares some form of resemblance, anything goes.
A photograph may fade or become lost, or a photographic moment missed, but the permanent record of loved ones will always be in our mind for as long as we can remember. Therefore, do we actually need photographs in the first place.