Dream Sequence #6

i need to get  film. that and getting the rolls developed are usually top priorities but this time my phone broke and my cat needs to go to the vet.

i feel odd asking for film donations, so if you know me in real life and would like to trade shoots for film message me. this is the first time in many months that i feel like setting up shoots again, so i’d really love to take advantage of this feeling and make images.

where

can you say if it’s in your lungs? or your stomach, or your chest.

is it round, long?

(still. still?)

you won’t die from it

because it’snot that easy)

the photolab i go to color corrected several of my negatives without telling me. i’m trying to not be as furious as i initially felt, but i felt like flinging the cd into the sky. when i have time i’ll probably rescan them on my own and delete the ones i’ve posted. 

i find the crayola sky in the beach photos funny, but i know that’s not how they actually look. 

i guess that for me

photography would be a passion.

writing would be a compulsion.

even when i don’t write the urge fills me until i’m nauseous. yes. i’ve stood in bookstores feeling like i would implode from the need and then i’d sulk, needing to write but not wanting to. and then i started shooting again last january, because everything i needed to write about then was triggering, so i had to stay away except for little annoying bursts that i would scribble into different books or websites.

so i could say that photography saved me at one point because it was a distraction. it was a way to convert moods and memories into images. the photograph, not as its own image but as an end result, is usually entirely different from what it started out as. some of the ones that look natural are actually posed and i have no bad feelings about that at all, because for me they match something i felt. for example, in a shoot where i had a few specific things in mind: the model is staring into the lens in a dark bathroom as the shower runs. very simple. for me, it might have been part of something i felt years ago involving a lover walking in the rain. one thing had nothing to do with the other visually, but the emotion i felt in the memory i tried to recreate with an image. now, how anyone else wants to interpret it (or not interpret it and just enjoy it for a shower photo) is fine with me. 

which makes it hard to place my work into things like series and it makes it hard to write an “artist’s purpose” when i finally start submitting to contests or websites. i see it and i get completely turned off with all this. taking photos is something personal for me, and though i like sharing it with people i had no plans at all besides feeling release. this is, i’ve figured out, why i haven’t been shooting at all. i mean, i guess i have been shooting but i haven’t been doing “shoots”, i haven’t been sure of what i want to release through images.

i am figuring things out slowly. when i write more i photograph less. it’s tougher for me to do both than it might be for most people.