failure of romance #1
time was the photographs were my problem. the taking was fine: seeing the thing, camera eye framed and squeezing the shutter blind a moment, reflected light impacting silver. it was all that came after that i despised: slips of paper, bromides clumped and crumpled in gelatin — evidence floating the gap between what i wanted and the pith i got. taking pictures wasn’t my problem. it was the conduct of the product that left me cold. i preferred it latent.
if failure is inevitable with development, then a calculated cultivation of suspension i’d make my intent. it’s not uncommon for photographers to scrabble notes about exposure settings or light conditions for future reference and i figured to do the same. narrate the act, transcribe the conditions of transaction:
jess, kate and blackberry bushes we found after picking full hat full, forearms thorn scratched, fingers blue black. will bake pie if not sun tired.
afternoon and alone on the bainbridge ferry. storm grey light across the water. don’t remember anything so beautiful as this.
last shot of grandma before leaving the hospital. doesn’t have much nice to say.
trail along the outer rim. cool air, monsoon clouds forming north.
kitty bird and her boyfriend[?] in the back of dale’s truck.
those plastic smoking chairs out around behind work.
baily’s blue couch. slept here. a lot.
mitch is a motherfucker.
etc
at the end of a roll i’d fold up the litany, rubber band it to the canister and toss it in the box with all the others. i’d make photography all a motion: endless and deferred, eternally inferred. like how i remembered. make the pictures. not matter.
the means
It shouldn’t matter which camera you use, but the truth is the make and maker make us swoon. For years my self was satisfied to possess a Hasselblad — a contrivance so reputable I could never afford the lenses, so revered that, at least until the collapse of the analog market, I could trade it for a used car. Mercifully my ’blad no longer lords its value over me. I needn’t care for what it wants.
My suggestion for any new camera you might acquire — whether factory fresh or just fresh to you — is to forget about it. Shirk it off to a shelf to gather dust, or if it’ll fit toss it in a jumble drawer, if not then gambol it to the garage. Doesn’t matter really, box it up and bury it in the ground if that’s what’ll get it out of sight. If you can’t keep it out of mind then best lend it indefinitely to an untrusted friend.
Should your photographic needs be more immediate then drop it, more then once, hard, to the ground. Bang it against a door jam, leave it out in the rain, drown it in the lake. Resist the feel of the sleek lines in your hand, the possibilities of its capabilities, the rigor mortis of its engineering. What you wanna do is make it known who’s in charge.
Some day I hope to own an Ebony view camera. Likely never make a picture with it.
artifacts
/ there are no final prints
/ an arm, a leg, maybe a spleen, but always a corpse of work
/ your audience is, will be, and always were other photographers
/ experiencing time forward doesn’t make the new by necessity better
/ mediations on quality are opinion, fashion, trend, blessing, and canonization
/ it’s quotations all the way down
I dreamed I gave a lecture
Barthes is often misquoted, erroneously, as having stated that from one to as much as four percent of the weight of the world’s material possessions are photographs. An absurd number, for what is a photograph — a slip of paper, an amalgram of pixels — when compared to a coat, a horse, a house, or a gun? Yet practically this calculation is far too modest a model, for what holds down our walls, stiffens our wallets, and fattens our resolve? Not to mention all those photographs we’ve born before, lost, and can conjure now, stark and embellished by our machinations. The staggering toil of augmentation is merciless. The persistent entitlement to abduct time and appropriate likeness serves best to condense our dreams, compound our memories, and sentimentalize our fears. Trapped in this way, portentous and latent, aleatoric and discriminate, mutinous and inimical, light lies, always in wait. It’s not the seeing that we care so very much about, but the beings seen and the gravity of being seen again.
alternating current
hey, is your power out?
yeah. my power’s out.
mine too. i’m just down the street.
i was in the basement when everything
went dark, thought it was a fuse.
yeah. i got no air conditioning. no fan. no tv.
porch lights are on across the street,
so they’re alright.
yeah. all we got’s daylight.
i hope it doesn’t last long.
maybe i should call the electric company.
at least it’s not like that one time.
this happened before?
oh yeah. the whole thing was out.
from New York to California.
the whole country?
yeah everything.
coast to coast. out.
for four weeks.
with the army you have
There was foot bridge near my work in Shinagawa that spanned an industrial canal flowing off from Tokyo bay. I’d wait there if I was early, nursing a can of Kirin from the convenience store and peering into the deep black water, soothed by the silver spines skipping across cresting waves of current.
One day as I approached the bridge I saw a young salaryman intently watching the water lost to his thoughts. The weird thing was that he was leaning against the opposite rail of the bridge from where I always stood. I remember thinking, why would he do that? It wasn’t as beautiful that direction, just a view of the factories, of the docks.
The moment I settled into my familiar place facing the bay, the light and space spread vista before me, I immediately realized what I previously never cared to noticed. I always looked to where the water was coming from, to where it had been, just as my thoughts are often on the things that have gone before, on what had already happened, on all that I’d done.
So I turned toward the other side, walked over to see how things might look from a perspective focused on the future, to place my weight on the far railing and gaze upon a current that was going somewhere, to imagine all that might still be done.
I couldn’t take it for more than a few seconds. Honestly, watching all that water flow out from me made me nauseous.
analgesic
your feelings, your experiences, your ideas are an auspicious, even admirable place to begin, just know when you’ve finally reached an end none of that should matter anymore. what there will be is something you’ve never seen before and what that will be is the very thing you did not even know you most needed.
failure of romance #2 (google maps street view)
to plot those places
where i last remember you
time and time again
failure of romance #3
i quit every other day and the other days i don’t even bother. i should’ve been a poet or a painter, or even smarter, taken those automotive repair classes in high school or got a good job at the shipyard like everyone else. maybe i should’ve went to a vocational cooking school, or better pestered my mother into buying me an electric guitar when i was twelve so i could’ve run away at fifteen to a southern california suburb to star in an angry punk rock band. instead what i’ve got are cameras, film, a darkroom i can’t afford, chemicals and paper. yet even with these riches i scarcely manage to fit any one thing worth your whiles to the confines of the material, never mind the unending erosion, for better or worse, of my very own wiles. it’s a feeble medium and it’s not keen to forgive. on my best days i think to tell the world important things, but let’s be honest, i cannot. it doesn’t work that way. it’s the cameras that do the telling and the most they ever tell me is what i’m in need of knowing. i scratch out the bits and pieces i remember and do what i can to smuggle them out to you. i try my best. i try to guess where you’ll be. i try to pronounce the languages you might speak. i try to carry on the mannerisms that might make your mind. i don’t know. the cameras don’t care what they do. the cameras don’t need to be used. there are long lonely days when i think the cameras are just fine by themselves as if maybe i should’ve been somebody else. like what i should’ve been is a clerk, a conductor, an electrician. some kind of catalyst. pure and invisible.
on Instagram
with mustered musement and merriment, a dispensation: at its most elemental, photography serves to reify that which the photographer deems worthy. to make a photograph is to assert value, and it is this assertion of value, in the form of a representation, that is, first and foremost, (re)iterated through dissemination. Instagram facilitates both acts: the taking and the trajectory, framing both as, as simple and as swift and as seamless as swiping a few onscreen buttons. And, unlike other models of making [a pro camera, being an artist, etc] and shaking [a book, the newspaper, a gallery or museum for example] that may by convention be bound by cost, time, purpose, profession, skill, education, social standing and/or experience, Instagram offers a relatively unencumbered mechanism to readily participate in a radically differing vista: the quotidian. to peruse a nexus of Instagram connections and to contribute your own photographs to that well, is to play a part in the real time accumulation, a steadying (re)valuation, of some of what gets us, singularly and together, through each day: friends, family, pets, places and food; something beautiful, something funny, something seen, and something done. it is in this way that the common practice of judging the relative merit of an individual photograph falls flat in the face of the Instagram interface. for the import of Instagram is in the very fact of each photograph having been produced and of the near-instantaneous shared profusion of countless such photographs across a network of exchange in which the legal tender is ♥ and minds [ie comments] and the reward, irregardless of the likes, is a reinforced sense of identification. every photograph a shiver not unlike your own.