Darkroom / Alternative

Exhibited: Facing Phobias

Places

In Transit

Why I Photograph

Written after Joan Didion’s “Why I Write”

Like painting or writing or any form of art, photography is an act of opening a window, of allowing the viewer to see a small piece of your world, a glance through your lens or looking glass. It’s a way of saying welcome to my world, this is my view, I’ve captured this for you to experience over and over again. You could say that the impression of a piece of artwork depends greatly upon the artist– as she makes the decision to capture a specific moment, light, angle or mood, arresting the viewer’s attention to a particular subject or message with a click of the shutter release– but there is no avoiding the reality that how and what the viewer encounters and observes is responsible for how they interpret and translate what it is they read, hear, see.

I tell you this not only because it is commonly forgotten, but because it needs to be stated, in my own words, on behalf of my own integrity as a photographer. Like many artists, I have more than just one method of creating: I write, I paint, I design. I think a great deal: I philosophize, for example, about life in very general terms, but I couldn’t call myself a philosopher. I am no Ansel Adams. I am not in the least a professional, at this point in my life, at anything, which is not to say that when I heard the word “commencement” or “the real world” that I became lazy, inattentive or afraid at the thought of figuring out my future, but only to say that I’m a shifting shape without a mold– I always have been. When I was seventeen I yearned, with naïve hope, to build a foundation for my identity, but instead ended up constructing a small voice out of frail traits I acquired along the way, much like building with popsicle sticks.

Essentially, I tried to not be someone. I failed. My attempts were counteracted by reminders, of who I was and too often of who I might want to be, of what was expected, or unexpected, by anyone who knew me in the slightest of ways, the familiar. I would focus on impressions, and end up creating the worst. I would invest time into fostering new friendships, and end up joining increasingly eclectic groups of peers like the drama club and the marching band kids, even though I was in neither the drama club or the marching band. When I say that I joined increasingly eclectic groups you might assume, if you ever did this yourself, that I simply intended to make new friends, but that wasn’t all. I was actually trying to be someone I had never been by being myself, as if I hadn’t been myself all along. An ironic impossibility.

I struggled with the thought of growing up, not because I had trouble dealing with getting older– I craved maturity, and I looked forward to the thought of college, a career, a spouse and a family as much as the next person, the future as a concept being the thought that propelled me forward– but mostly because I occasionally realized with dread my inability to contain everything I experienced, learned and observed. Out of a then-dire necessity I began to journal my final year of high school, and I expected this to solve the problem of having moments slip between my fingers, so long as I committed to it. I did this. On the occasion that I felt something real, something foreign, anything unexplainable or invigorating, I sought to record it. I can’t attest to the urgency or clarity of anything that I wrote down, both of which may have seemed to be the very reasons for writing anything down at all in the first place, but I can still remember etching my existence into a notebook at the foot of my bed with only God and myself as my witness, the way it felt to grasp and anchor a piece of an idea from the sporadic breeze of my thoughts. More often than not I was constantly striving to document the essence of everything rather than its actual existence; I would write about the nature of things without really understanding them, not concerned with the why’s and how’s. Back then I was a third grade art project held together by Elmer’s glue. I knew that simply writing about something wouldn't settle it. All I knew was what I had done and where I had been, and all I had was a pen and paper and a mere notion of how I felt. I knew that something was missing, and it took a while to understand what I lacked.

Which was a second dimension.

By which I mean not a “cleaner” or more “publishable” way of writing, but a more solidified development of my thoughts, a more focused and direct way of relaying what I had to say, letting my thoughts go and letting them form into concrete in a concrete world, if I so chose. Had my mind never wandered, I would never have become a photographer. Had I absent-mindedly acknowledged the details I saw in my waking hours as basic shapes with rounded edges instead of identifying them as sharpened, frayed forms, there would be no reason for me to create. I photograph to understand what I see, what a moment is saying, what whispers. What I know to what I think. What I feel to what I believe. What I individually witness– it’s a matter of presence. A reflection of a starry sky in a puddle at night, a lone tree in a barren stretch of land along the highway, a skyline between the flickering straight beams on a bridge as I ride the train. There are canyons and crevices of undiscovered moments yet to be captured, yet to be crystallized.

Why did I hold onto details so tightly at the dawn of my thought collections, and why was I so intent on evolving from my past myself? How could I make sense of this paradox? What can I do with these seeds?

When I say seeds, I mean the darting, jumping, floating kernels of thought, ideas that travel and fall sporadically but have so much weighted potential. When I was a kid there was a book called The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle that narrated the ventures of a tiny seed in the unchanging cycle of a plant’s life. The seed had an exciting life. You could follow its obstacles as it was carried by the wind, the wind paralleled time through moving the seed forward and the seed was a witness to this passage of time, being tossed around along with fellow seeds that were used, abused, and neglected. Science books told us the same story. I wasn’t entertained by it, nor did I care to hear it repeated even as a child, but I related to the tiny seed. Anchor the seed somewhere, and you’ll eventually see it bloom. It could. You can’t pull a plant out of a seed. You just let it grow. You don’t stare at it. You ignore it, glancing back only so often to make sure it’s still there and you act as if the seed is only an experiment and you keep from thinking that it’s anything personal, that it holds potential.

These seeds are like thoughts that have yet to formulate, and their potential, too, has yet to be weighed. Potential is something I’ve learned to assume lightly, as every thought has potential but only few thoughts live up to it. All I know is that thoughts are infants. Deciding to turn a thought into its visual potential can either be impulsively or carefully handled, just as surely as nurturing a child one way will lead him to act a certain way and believe certain things, affecting the person he becomes. Many people are capable of taking a picture, but know little about the power of an image. The production of photographs as art is intentional, and the statement or moment it encapsulates is the direct maturation of a thought seed. The idea determines the composition. The idea determines whether a photograph will be a portrait, a still-life, black and white or color, film or digital. The idea composes the details and the composition of the details show you, or show me, what I want to say. Just see.

It presents itself.

You don’t present it.

I recently created a photograph essay just as I create anything, out of several small details, and usually with a “plan” from which I usually wander. I had only two ideas in my mind, which I hoped to set aside for a concept more elaborate, more subjective and original, a collection worth looking at and not looking over, a series of photographs so jarring it would set me apart, for better or for worse as an artist. Regarding the seeds: the first was an edge. A sharp edge. This was evidently a guide to the images– images in which anything could cling, could fall, could end off the edge, “abstract“ images that leave most audiences with just barely enough detail to form a narrative– and yet I had no “narrative,” no agenda. The second seed was a series of scenes that I pictured. An intersection. A view of the ground from the top of a tall building. Someone sitting in the corner of a room. The scenes blend. They flash together and dissipate. They slip in and out of the mesh netting of my mind as fluidly as water, never successfully anchored. I keep fishing because they’re trying to show me something, and I know they won’t last: they’re all related ideas, corners and edges. How could I illustrate these? Why should I? What are these ideas worth? The questions made the answers obsolete, as these specific seeds began to form the initial images:

An intersection of metal beams. A vacant chair in the corner of an empty classroom. Staircase railings from above, a view of the first floor of a mall from the fourth.

This is how my photographing began, all the associations I could draw from “corners and edges.”

Other ideas generated, presented themselves, often not as visions, but through a single word at times. Sometimes a feeling. Another time a stray tumbleweed of information. A snippet of conversation in passing. A caption. I seemed to notice corners and edges more as my weeks continued. I would notice them on my commutes. The seed became a seedling. It grew into a weed. The weed seemed to thrive and spread. I would take detours, curious to find something I didn’t already notice. I remember standing on the top of a parking garage holding my camera, suddenly tired and wondering what I would have thought about photographing views from the top of a parking garage if I had never held a camera before or knew anything about the impact of an angle. One of the photographs that resulted from that shoot ended up making the final collection, as most other shoots did, and yet that day felt like one of the least successful.

An idea that I thought did succeed, one that rippled in my mind after thrown in with the others, evolved into the set of photographs I took of natural forms. I scanned through body parts in my mind, trying angles, shadows, testing my limits, surpassing them. I couldn’t express the thoughts that slid through my mind. I could list things I imagined. I remember feeling foolish, that I had somewhere exaggerated. I remember feeling my representations were empty, worthless, lost. I don’t remember what I thought. I could tell you that I planned out the composition for each and every photograph, from framing, to lighting to props to expression, but I never had.

I added these images to the series. The comparisons came later, as did the questions, when I began to sequence them as a collection. Which pieces connected, if there were similarities in form, how the photographs commented on one another, what conversation was exchanged. What are these photographs saying? Why should they be in this order? I see corners and edges daily; the essay continues. Sometimes I hear it when I walk on sidewalks.

These photographs existed before they were photographs.

These photographs began as seeds.

Until I put the ideas to images, I had no idea what to make of them, and how to really “picture” them did not occur until I took pictures. There was no collection, no files, no physical prints that could explain for me. What I’ve gathered is that until I took the images, there might never have been any anchor to my ideas, no harvest, just a dusty breeze. Until I had begun, I had no conception of what it could become, nothing more than a handful of loose seeds. But then it grew.

These photographs existed before they were photographs.

These photographs began as seeds.

These photographs do not determine my style, lead me anywhere. These photographs that unfold in the open daylight of my day-to-day, but also tell secrets about shadows only I can see. Let me tell you why photographers photograph: when questions arise, we open a window to let in the breeze.