This photograph and a series of others (categorized: These Objects Have Meaning) are from my current project. My thought throughout this project is that much like a camera does to the subject matter which it frames, we assign meaning to those objects around us. In turn, those objects inform who we are. Some of those meanings are more exact than others. Some speak to us directly and clearly. Others speak in metaphor. The same is true of a photograph. The process becomes a dialogue of sorts as we try to understand ourselves in relationship to our surroundings.
Part two of These Objects Have Meaning, which are a collection of personal artifacts I’ve collected can be found here.
Photography, Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner and The Great Community
“Port William had little written history. Its history was its living memory of itself, which passed over the years like a moving beam of light. It had a beginning that it had forgotten, and would have an end that it did not yet know. It seemed to have been there forever.”
from Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
While reading Wendell Berry’s essay, “Wallace Stegner and The Great Community” I found the following quote by a Stegner from his essay, “The Book and the Great Community” worth further contemplation.
“Thought is neither instant nor noisy…It thrives best in solitude, in quite, and in the company of the past, the great community of recorded human experience. That recorded experience is essential whether one hopes to re-assert some aspect of it, or attack it.”
The first half of the quote, “thought is neither instant or noisy,” I consider an expectation. Those words ask that I wake up earlier than absolutely necessary in the mornings and dedicate time to contemplation, to reading and writing, and to working on my photography. It asks that I put that first, before I punch the clock at my job because like the majority of us I assume, my job is not my first passion and so why not in a very practical fashion put my job second. This is not to suggest that those jobs are bad or a necessary evil. They are simply necessary and provide us income by which we can sustain ourselves.
Although the context of Stegner’s quote is perhaps more about writer and the written word it is applicable to other disciplines that rely upon history. The camera is a recording device just as is pen and paper or keyboard and word processor and so “the great community of recorded human experience” should resonate with the photographer and the poet because there is not just an expectation, but an obligation. The obligation is that we respond to that which we are a part of, the greater community. It ask that we respond to the history set before us and in doing so, create a future history. Our future is relational to the past and hence the recording of that history becomes communal, and hopefully a somewhat responsible, thoughtful and considerate exchange of beliefs, values, and ideas.
Grandma Winnie by James Dewhirst
A portion of this recording is a very large stack of photographs, each depicting a particular place and time not just of historical significance but also of the mundane. Assassinated politicians, warfare, meetings of diplomatic dignitaries, signings of peace treaties, birthday parties, grandmothers and their grandchildren, men arm in arm beer in hand, and sons key in hand to their first car. This is how we’ve recorded that human experience or as Berry puts it, “The community here is that of ’recorded human experience’ not the Pantheon of Great Writers. It is immense and diverse, more like the Library of Congress than the Harvard Five-Foot Shelf. But it does include the great writers. It is bewildering both in its amplitude and in the eminence of some of its members.” Both Garry Winogrand photographs and grandmother’s iPhone photographs are there. (One day iPhone photographs will be the tool of grandparents and it will be to some just as archaic a means of photography as drugstore film processing is today. All the same though, there will be photographs made, regardless of the medium through which they were produced.)
As members of this community we are asked to respond. Either to attack, not with the taking up arms, but with contemplation or we respond in celebration that our efforts are worthwhile and that there is good within us. And when we have given thought to our place within this history, knowing that our past is in communion with our future we are asked to write that future, contributing to who we will become or in the case of the photographer, we are to photograph and record who we are and who we are to become.
This photograph and a series of others (categorized: These Objects Have Meaning) are from my current project. My thought throughout this project is that much like a camera does to the subject matter which it frames, we assign meaning to those objects around us. In turn, those objects inform who we are. Some of those meanings are more exact than others. Some speak to us directly and clearly. Others speak in metaphor. The same is true of a photograph. The process becomes a dialogue of sorts as we try to understand ourselves in relationship to our surroundings.
Part two of These Objects Have Meaning, which are a collection of personal artifacts I’ve collected can be found here.
The Windmill Movie by Alexander Olch is a film about finding oneself in one’s work and about how finding oneself in one’s work blurs truth and fiction. It is about confrontation and about not being able to complete a body of work for seemingly surmountable but inexplicably insurmountable reasons.
In the film, there is a great scene in which a character is asked, “Do you think you change things when you remember them?” to which the character replies, “Yes I do.” Memory, much like photography I believe, is a result of the act of observation and The Windmill Movie challenges our understanding of how the act of observation affects reality. (more info)
This turkey leg photograph is from a new series, a small edit of older photographs which I have been wanting to do something with for some time now. Food Photography can be found on my newly designed website here.
As opportunities to share my work continue to be graciously afforded to me I am excited to share that a portion of my work from, Are We Alive Yet?will be on display at the upcoming Photo LA on January 14, 2011.
photo l.a. returns to the historic Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for its 21st edition January 12 – 16, 2012. Continuing the discourse on photography’s place in the fine arts, photo l.a. provides galleries from around the globe a platform for the exhibition of vintage masterworks and contemporary photography, as well as video and multimedia installations. This exciting juxtaposition creates the unique environment that characterizes photo l.a. (more info)
This photograph and a series of others (categorized: These Objects Have Meaning) are from my current project. My thought throughout this project is that much like a camera does to the subject matter which it frames, we assign meaning to those objects around us. In turn, those objects inform who we are. Some of those meanings are more exact than others. Some speak to us directly and clearly. Others speak in metaphor. The same is true of a photograph. The process becomes a dialogue of sorts as we try to understand ourselves in relationship to our surroundings.
Part two of These Objects Have Meaning, which are a collection of personal artifacts I’ve collected can be found here.
Hate the autocracy of the kept gates all you like, but the forge of rejection purifies us (provided it doesn’t burn us down to a fluffy pile of cinder). The writer learns so much from rejection about himself, his work, the market, the business. Even authors who choose to self-publish should, from time to time, submit themselves to the scraping talons and biting beaks of the raptors of rejection. Writers who have never experienced rejection are no different than children who get awards for everything they do: they have already found themselves tap-dancing at the top of the “I’m-So-Special” mountain, never having to climb through snow and karate chop leopards to get there.
I first found the list, 25 Things Writers Should Know About Rejection, via A Photo Editorwho shared 16. Know The Signal to Self-Publish which is also a good one on the list that could be advice applicable to a photographer. Really though, all twenty-five are good advice for any creative and worth posting somewhere visible, perhaps directly behind the computer monitor at which rejection emails are received.
