I believe I've come to a sad crossroads. My life is of no interest to anyone including myself, and my opinions about things. . . well, we all know about opinions. The result is that my writing is of no consequence. Was it ever? I think for awhile it was a bit entertaining. There was a real enthusiasm if nothing else. I have no enthusiasm for anything any longer. My concerns are only for the day's agonies. It is nearly impossible to get outside of them. For now, at least, I must give up writing "the daily." I'll just end it by saying things are not going so well with my health now. It is the new normal I will have to get used to. I'm going to need to learn how to observe the world in a new, less personal way. If I don't, there will be nothing left to say.
It is a sad resignation.
This will be hard, though, after years of confession, even when it wasn't absolutely true. If I can pull up something good from the past to write about now, that'll be alright. Back in more heroic times.
I will talk of pictures when I can. I like the blurry ones, the out of focus ones, the ones that seem like nothing but a mistake. A fellow at the cafe the other day asked me about my camera and talked about photography for a long while. Young guy with a lot of enthusiasm. He was both anxious and nervous to show me some of his photography on his phone. It was good--sharp, clean images well composed. Photography used to be much more difficult because you had to know so many things. I started before autoexposure cameras were around, and long before they could autofocus. And of course, there was nothing digital. You loaded your camera with film, and that was an important choice. Black and white or color. Prints or slides. Most of us shot black and white for the simple reason that we could go into the dark room and develop the film with whatever chemical we thought best, and we could print them to whatever perfection we desired. The rest of the world was taking snapshots with cheap cameras with heap color film and then would take them to the drugstore to be developed and printed in small 4x6 prints. But "we photographers" had the magic.
You needed to choose the right film speed for what you were shooting. That is completely unnecessary with a modern digital camera or a phone. If you chose a slow film because it gave you better grain and details but then got into a low light situation, you would have a hard time not getting photos with camera shake. If we shot color, it was usually slide film, but that was the most unforgiving film of all. You had to hit exposures dead on. People on vacations often shot slide film so they could project them for their unwilling friends in their own homes.
"Here we are at Rock City. That's little Andy's hand on the right side of the picture."
By and large, it took a lot of knowledge and effort to make a really good photograph. But the people I studied with went even further than that. Jerry Uelsmann famously made his fantasy prints in the darkroom combining images from multiple negatives. I watched him do it. There was a lot of trial and error before he got a satisfactory print. Todd Walker was using a printing press and silk screens that ran a black and white negative through three or four colors to make his unmistakable images. And Doug Prince was printing images on plexiglass that he layered in boxes to give a three dimensional sculpture.
They probably ruined me. But they liked my photographs well enough and I got to show pictures in photo exhibitions at the college when they were good enough.
I spent hours and hours in those photo labs. Back then we were sort of like alchemists or magicians, and people were happy for us to take their picture.
Now an iPhone can do all of that and more in mere moments. As I looked at the young fellows photos on his phone, I was struck with a number of different emotions, so I was surprised to find that he had set up his own darkroom.
"I black out my bathroom and set up everything in the shower. I love watching the prints develop."
Well, there you go. A whole new set of emotions.
One other thing he told me about the photos on his phone. He shot them all with a Fuji camera, and all the images were basically just as they came out of the camera. I still can't do that, and I spend a lot of time tweaking the images I take. Maybe it is a throwback to my early days in the lab. Working an image just seems necessary. And definitely, those old Polaroid concoctions were influenced by my college profs.
The kid asked me if I had any pictures on the internet.
"Oh, no. . . I don't do social media. I can't stand rejection. It doesn't matter what you put up, there are always going to be people who have shitty things to say about the work." I never tell anyone about the blog.
One has to greatly admire Vivian Maier and her ilk. They were content to make photos for themselves. Who knows why. Maybe they felt they would be contaminated by people's opinions about their work, that it would change the way the saw things for the worse. Many people like to "workshop" their stuff, but I am with Hemingway on this one when he said in his Nobel acceptance speech, "Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing."
I think that is true for all creative acts. By and large.
O.K. There it is, the first post not written as a daily confessional. That was alright. We'll see.
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