Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Way Back Machine



I almost didn't write today.  I don't know.  Things get weird.  For some reason, though, I was thinking about NYC in the '70s, the time I first went there.  It was a different place then.  Everyone wishes they had gone there now.  That is the trouble.  We always wish we would have been there.  With a camera. 

I was.

Then my mother threw away all the photography I did in the '70s. 

I feel like that about much now.  Why didn't I do more?  I was there (wherever) and good (enough at times), so why wasn't I obsessive?  That's what it takes, of course, if you want to do anything really well. That's why young work is so much better.  You need energy to be obsessive. 

That is not my photograph.  I don't know whose it is.  Can't remember.  There was a lot of mid-level street photography in the '70s.  Newspapers and magazines love to dig it up now to show those "mean streets."  And they were.  Those were existentially empty years of little to no aesthetics. 

Watch all the John Cassavetes films, the ones he directed.  That's what it was like. 

It's just so difficult to go to old places now without the Way Back Machine. But that's what cameras are. 

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