...I think that more than anything else, I'm feeling frustrated and feel like I've exhausted my immediate surroundings as a subject. Maybe that's the hazard of taking photos everyday? Or maybe I'm looking for a "voice" or a "vision" in my work? One of the things I admire about Mitch (who comes most immediately to mind since there's been an in-depth discussion of his work in another thread) is that he has found his "voice" in his work.
Lately, I feel like I'm just thrashing around, without focus (or maybe I'm just backfocusing a bit) and my practice has become an empty set of motions to go through. I'm not real clear on this yet, but it reminds me of a pianist I knew in art school who quit playing music because he could make his fingers go where they needed to be but his spirit couldn't follow. I think he's a filmmaker now.
I'm trying to make sense, thanks for bearing with me.
Oh, and if I had the money, I'd buy everyone an M8, starting with Cam, because she wants one and would she would TOTALLY rock it.
Maggie, Imants Krumins, who's a great artist that unfortunately got himself banned here, said that taking good pictures in Bangkok is like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course he has a point in that places that have a denseness of life and variety of visual impact like Bangkok and Tokyo help to create a type of photography. In Japan, there are scads of "Tokyo photographers" that are bound to be there in a city of 30 million people where there is such a variety of life. Take Bangkok versus Singapore: to me it's just easier to find visually interesting subjects here than in Singapore, where, for example, the old Chinese shophouses, where people live on the second floor, have been gentrified and preserved as tourist reserves — no tropical squalor there. So, any vibrant city tends to create it's own photography.
But, it seems to me, that is not all there is to it. In Paris last year I saw the great retrospective Lee Friedlander exhibiton: what struck me were his shots of famous scenes in the US West, all of which had been photographed by Anselm Adams — it was amazing to me how Friedlander's compositons in these photographs were so much more complex and interesting than those of Adams, which goes to show that even with a type photography that one thinks may have been done to death, a new approach and a new interpretation can be found. And some of Firedlander's books can be a good antidote to the
malaise you're referring to Maggie: when he had a knee operation a few years back and was housebound for some six months he produced
Stems, a book of B&W photographs of flower stems seen through vases and glass shot of the flower vases his wife placed in his room; his book on the Sonora desert, which has pictures of branches and twigs, all seemingly similar, but which as you go from page to page, become a "where's Waldo" hunt in which you begin to see the varied compositional forms of each pictures; or
Stick and Stone, his book on urban America seen through the unpromising visual garbage — traffic signs and chainlink fences — that litter the cities but which he reveals in a fascinating way as a major element of the landscape that we always look past and don't see for its own type of beauty. Yes, looking at these Friedlander books can get you out of your funk. Have a go at it.
Yes, Cam, whom I had lunch with in Paris, is great; but I doubt that she really needs the M8, as she has enough ideas to wear out her GRD and GRD2!
—Mitch/Bangkok
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10268776@N00/