Le photographie

This blogger thing is a pain in the ass. I had some illustrative pictures uploaded, but they were lost. So this is without benefit of visual aids.

Anyhow, I don't so much like reading how i should take pictures and then following the rules, but after doing it, I certainly feel like I have a bit more framework for thinking about framing and picture taking. Its pretty nice. I like the feeling of working through my problems and making progress. I just don't like the feeling of being made into a guinea pig. So I made my girlfriend be my guinea pig.

This project presents my primary dilemma with this class. Do I get all formal and make a project that I am ambivalent about, or do I get personal and make a project that doesn’t conform. I am by nature a perfectionist and a non-planner. No matter what, though, in order to achieve what I want in this sort of class, I have to plan ahead, learn the basic rules of the tools so that the rules don’t confine me, they set me free (hallelujah!!). I am good when I am involved and boring or worse when I use an excuse and opt out. With this project, I didn’t really learn all there was to know about digital photography before I got into the actual project.

I was pretty cocky. I should have been a bit more hen-like. Certain moments found me entering into that strange photographic zen state in which one sees clearly through the view finder, thinks instantaneously about balance and composition and pushes the button at an interesting time.

That was very nice. Often I realized that my best pictures I hadn’t even experienced, because I was so absorbed in what was going on in front of me. Then later, I could look at peoples’ poses and the scenery. It was sort of like the way that people do all sorts of interesting things when they are young and then when they are old they reflect upon those interesting things instead of continuing to do new interesting things. Is photography is aging me prematurely?

This project has gotten me thinking seriously about photography. I should have given more time and taken more pictures without flash or of interesting subjects outside at night. I like to experiment with the camera but the way that I did it, caused me a couple of late nights that I should have not forced myself into. That was bad. What’s worse is that many of my pictures are out of focus. I have to be ready to do my work, not my leisure activities during the day.

I am starting to think about the idea that photography steals the soul. This might account for the way that people tend to cringe or at least brace themselves into a pose when they know they are being photographed. It also reflects in part why people are so haggard in this country, because we live in such a capture-happy culture, people are on guard and security and cleanliness obsessed. The world has to be just right, the world is a dangerous place where anything can and will be used against you by political and emotional terrorists. As Loudon Wainwright sang (probably quoting someone else), people are all dying to be on T.V., to escape being free. It’s all very Erich Fromm. So, that is my rationalization for taking the second option. I wanted to consider the interactions between myself and the people around me. It could have just been that I was shy, but I don’t like to think that. Instead, I was boldly confronting myself by using the impersonal, aggressive action of photography and learning to use it humanely.

My girlfriend turned out to be a perfect case for this study. I started out very clinically following her around and making her stop what she was doing and pose for me. In the process, I began to grate on her nerves. Eventually, for the photography as well as other items on the proverbial laundry list, she got mad at me. She chewed me out for being hyper-critical, and then we got into an absurd kind of fight in which we don’t yell at one another, she just pretends that I am not there at all, makes plans to leave and hang out with someone else, then we make up after I tell her I will try to be a better person in the way she wants me to be better.

I must admit that the fight was mostly about things other than photography, but for my being in a coldly photographic frame of mind: distanced from subject, observing, non-committal. That mindset really made the fight bigger. In the end, I wound up taking more humane, more loving and careful pictures of her, during the fight and once we had made up. It turns out that taking good pictures can be done, but you need to put in the work and focus to do it. I guess it is nice to know that people can change, at least in the short term.