As Bees in Honey Drown

just when I feel like I have hit photo rock bottom a ray of sunshine begins to shine and I get to do something that is cool and new and exciting. I have 660 images to edit and I haven't been this excited in a while. More to come...


And you should all go see As Bees in Honey Drown.

jumping off the deep end

So here are some thoughts:

1) I am a little tired of doing commercial work these days. I just feel that I get overwhelmed with deadlines and then I don't do anything that excites me and I just fall back on things I know work and I know are good enough. Plus I have been having to shoot in terrible spaces lately that just depress me when I edit them. Seriously why are all events held in dark dreary places? Why??

2) I have decided that the reason I can't make solid work that I love has nothing to do with a lack of ideas. In fact i know exactly what kinds of photos i want to make. in fact i have about 5 thousand images in my head waiting to be made. The problem is instead a matter of being at the wrong place in my life right now. (Actually in writing that down maybe that is exactly what i need to be photographing right now.) All I want to do is be a part of a family and have children in my day to day life so that I can really photographs from the inside of that world looking out rather than my current dilemma of being on the outside looking in. I want to make photographs like Sally Mann, Tierney Gearon, or even the woman who does this blog. It is SO frustrating to know what I want and simply not have the materials I need. I might as well not have a camera with how stuck I feel. I need to photograph the girls I nanny for more but even then, we go so long without seeing each other it is hard to be up to date on them and their lives enough to really capture their real personalities.

3) I need to get over this issue because my life is not rocketing toward parenthood anytime soon. Maybe I will start photographing all the times in my life that their is an absence of family? That feels really forced but maybe that is what I need to do... force myself to get over all this whining.

4) I am also freaking out a bit because I have come to the realization that this is the last photography I will take...maybe ever. That is terrifying. It is a passing of the baton from external forces pushing me to photograph to relying on my own internal drive. I can't decide if that will be relieving and freeing or overwhelming and crippling. I guess next semester will be a good test because I will still be able to be in the lab alot without actually having to be there. I feel very much like I am standing on the edge of something and I can't decide if I am going to jump or wobble here for a while.

reflecting

So I have been thinking about self portraits alot lately and in particular the fact that I constantly find myself making self portriats. This feels very strange to me considering how much I actually hate having my photograph taken.

So I have been looking back through the self portraits I have taken over time and I am trying to figure out what it is that draws me back to them. Part of it is definantly that I sometimes am the only person around but I haven't really made those types of self portraits in a while.

though here is one perfect example of that:

Then there was the photo project that I did when my grandma passed away. But in retrospect and through looking at those images I am realizing more and more that it wasn't so much about my feelings about my grandma's passing but was rather focused on feeling of disconnect. This feeling was however amplified by my first real loss experience. When I was going through these images they were actually hard for me to look at. Part of it is that they are so completely raw. They are nothing like the images I generally like to make (you know all those freaking kid pictures). Their is a sadness in these images that is actually palpable to me. But at the same time I do see connections between these images and the photos I make of other people. I try really hard to catch emotions that are as real and present in photos of other people as I did at one point in those images of myself. Which then leads me to the question of whether I am using other people(specifically kids) to express my emotions in a more visually interesting and accessible package.



I am just so much more drawn to the way these kids are experiencing sadness and frustration than I am to images of my own experiences. That might speak to my general discomfort with my own experience of...well, discomfort.

Maybe I need to do more self portraits (like all the time).

sorry frank!

(me in my first time out which pretty accurately describes how I feel about this blog right now)

Alright, so this is a very (VERY) long over due post that comes with a heart felt apology all around. I could tell you all about the reasons I have not been making any good art in the past month but I will save you the time and just leave it at the fact that I am in a funk.

Except not in the rest of my life, in fact I honestly feel that I can only make good art when the rest of my life is moderately falling apart. We will see how this pans out over the course of my life :/

But I have been shooting (don't you worry!) and I have some new photos to add for your viewing pleasure:

First up some roommate comparisons... I have really been exploring my apartment as in depth this year as I have focused on my home home in the past. So to begin with I am exploring it's inhabitants. It is fun because Caitlin and Mark are much more visually distinct (especially when it comes to their spaces) than my family tends to be.



Next up is the environmental explorers club which I have been volunteering with for the past few months. I do not have the images I want yet but I can keep going back and I think it will get more sucessful as I get to know the kids better. We will see.



Finally we have my visit to Rhode Island with my parents. This was a wonderful weekend and it was the first time I have been back home this semester. But unfortunantly I was only actually at my house for a few hours and then we climbed in the car and headed to RI to visit family. I still really love photographing my parents. they are such interesting people in my mind. But it is new photographing them now that they are empty nesters. They have always done an amazing job of staying interesting people through out parenthood but suddenly I am thrown into seeing them as individuals completely seperate from my sister and I and I can start to see them differently now. I don't know if these pictures capture that at all but that is what is driving my continued photographing of them.

Busy Busy Photo Bee

So another week has flown by. I feel extraordinarily busy right now. I am up at 7 or 730 am, 4 days a weeks for classes and observations/tutoring for my grad classes and then I am staying up way too late for my own good so this has resulted in a huge increase in my napping schedule. But all in all it is really good. I am doing things that I love. However, it has been a bit of a bummer because I have been having a hard time getting my self to photograph. It's just that when I get caught up in other things that I love (like crafting- which is my current obsession) I forget how much I LOVE photographing. Bah, I will have to work on remembering.

But I did get to photograph at stART and going through all those photos has been a real reminder of how much I love making images I am proud of.

So here is what you are really here for:










Just on a side note- I was having issues with an uncalibrated monitor so the colors on these are off a bit but I will hopefully have that resolved asap.

stART

So here is my favorite stART photo....

and here are some others:

Photo Time

I am realizing now more than ever that I get this crazy sorta photo-amnesia when I am photographing. I just get into this zone where everything that is going on is broken into these single images in my mind so when I think back on them I don't remember the events in whole but rather little bits an pieces. Also, I get so hyper-focused that I miss what is going on around what I am shooting. Like today a bunch of people told me they had waved to me while I was shooting at stART but I honestly don't remember seeing any of them. I kinda love the zone I get into because it makes time FLY by. I was at stART today for at least 5 hours and it felt like it just whizzed past.

But it was a blast today. I just love being outside and the weather was amazing and there were so many kids there to photograph. All in all, nice work stART team!!! So, I am in the lab now working on those photos and I will have them posted by the end of the night, fingers crossed.