And it came down barreling towards a conclusion, powerless and nothing to be done but wonder what is coming; fatídico thoughts, dread eating at my soul, old pain manifests, truth is life’s cicle of repeating, the dreaded wound your reptile brain in overdrive protecting you. A familiar feeling of destiny manifest, but it is not real -not this time- yet feels just the same…
Alone we travel through and try to be not, resisting and pretending -disassociated- Nothing to be done and nothing to look at, we all experience alone, its everywhere, in you, in me, one day you are here the next not. Go on and notice those who valiantly venture by themselves, are they enlightened or sentenced to an empty existence devoid of intimacy, is this judgement a certainty in progress or a projection of fear.
Cherished entanglements fall apart, decay, and with them disillusion rushes to fill the forsaken void. Glimpses of self shine through and in a moment of clear assessment manifests relief, the lost is now found.
https://rgz.photos/alone
Ackert Hook Rd
2/09/2021
X marks the spot where all those good photography things happen, a vantage point for that stunning sunset displayed on your phone’s screen. A spot, a finger press, and projections become filed to a place they can be retrieved from. A subjective act that needs to be periodically looked at, one that lies at the core of every image.
Be that your impulse is anything from: recording those sunset colors that mesmerize and appeal our cognition, to awareness of what is going on around you (time in space, people going about making for place in the world). Or share that moment in search of connection. I can only intuit what the other sees or feels… we are alone in there, but find comfort filling in the blanks with our own biases.
X marks the spot everywhere you stand, everywhere you go, and X marks the spot from where you point the objective to create the subjective. Understanding the dynamic is the starting point to making any image, intent and awareness follow.
But what is intent and how can we define awareness? Considering transformation of object into subject only requires a physical event (a shot, taking a picture, capturing the image), intent in its most essential manifestation is the documentary impulse inside all of us, and at it’s most polished an intentional framing of events. But most importantly consider awareness is the only one that runs the entire show, because in the end it is desire that drives taking pictures. When X marks the spot lacking the awareness to see, you cant desire it, and will never photograph that sunset.
Cape Cod
9/23/2020
Writing the words “build on the improvement” a cringe — the familiar smell of a self help book. A flashback with its own difficulties, but it is not what you think.
When I set to take a photograph it is really important, to do it right and do it well, Then start to wonder if building on improvement should be a repetitive exercise, a needed one. Yet wonder if I am trying to innocently go tumbling into novelty’s inevitable slow death, from tedium.
Of course none of the above is intended except that when “do it right, do it well” followed by “build on the improvement”, dumps you into a conceptual limitation, similar cycle of life then death and rebirth. Because the result of attempting to “do it right, do it well” is never going to be good enough and you just have this one conscious life.
“Build on the improvement” as your motto is a personalized death trap, maybe It is just a catch phrase to keep a stereotype feeding line alive- a tyrannical rule of convention where your connection to consciousness is encouraged out of reach, because after all you are mortal and inconsequential. So instead of “building on improvement” why can’t we just search for that elusive manifestation of your being which allowed us to see in the first place.
”It is really important for me, to do it right and do it well”, and no more
-ponder!
Ackert Hook Rd, NY
7/20/2020
The order of things recoded and the images of them, the last is first and the first is last, the middle in its rightful place is the only constant. A familiar rendezvous, the kiss, then intimacy of a whisper to the ear. And would you know that much I can tell you the left to right chronology is moving away from the nearest now.
Longing in whispers
Shouting forsaken love
Longing in whispers
For you to come home
Southbound on this country road my companion blurts “profound disappointment”, what is it about these two words coming together? The needed perversion: Disappointment must walk with profound to express it’s individuality… is disappointment so insecure that it cannot fully express itself without profound, and where does that leave profound devoid of proper agency and living validated by disappointment? A feeling of desperation, bad choices or the fact that things don’t turn out into the likenesses of fantasies and illusions?… The deck is stacked against you, so please step out and breathe, the fountain of youth is within reach.
A child forever in perpetual motion to make it’s way into the world, the drive itself is inaccessible to all but themselves, has to come from within and that must be respected. To help survive this process we nurture, protect, and encourage.
I like and enjoy children very much, and also avoid photographing them. Unfortunately those images can easily fall into that dreaded category of photography I call “like shooting fish in a barrel”, they are cute. Ask me if I believe the above images are successful? Yes and no… Go on and decide, that drive inside is also inaccesible to me.
I am you, you are me
We are one
Let me be
I am free, I am me.
Rhinebeck
8/20/2019
There are no hand-me-downs… love and the source of your strength does not go missing.
Garai
06/04/2019
The cyclops’s view is devoid of perceptual depth, only pretends to do so by appealing to memory. In a photograph lines, tonal transitions, and color to assemble what makes up for absent depth. You are imagining the space and it does not exist nor has it, but only in the imagination.
Familiarity after all is what makes the two dimensional depiction relatable. A moment now gone but permanent only from memory, and if you are fortunate enough what it feels to hold onto that memory, good or not it is your makeup. Listen to it!
Perhaps talking up the image for context as a form of self validation, the then inevitable valuation is necessary. But where is the real value on something that does not exist but only in the confines of a memory that by nature is selective… Does the image irritate you, finds you grieving, victimizes your sense of trespass.... What you feel is the only real content an image can posses, otherwise it just does not exist though your ego wants to say otherwise.
Lisboa
May 28 2019
Being is waiting. Waiting with company makes for people in waiting, still having no choice in the matter we do it alone even in familiar company. Sitting quietly, going somewhere you wait wherever that my be. Yet awareness persists while at the same rate time unravels without mercy, alleviating your boredom by all means is necessary. Your mind does not take breaks, so why not Simply feel instead of wrestling with boredom, engaging in gratifying though potentially painful awareness.
The photographs are right in front staring amused at your predicament. The shutter released and for once you might have found the self, after all the self only belongs to mere existence... there... there... go ahead and pat yourself in the back, touching transcendence a possibility, now manifest in the form of an image. And after that truly amazing act of self you worry, there is a piece of you floating around shift-shaped into an image, what waiting means, took a step back to see, then felt because waiting and self take the same space you are in.
I learn to love, I love you.
Stoneridge 5/13/2019
Sucked into the vacuum /things-found
What is with desire? Maybe the place someone or something captures your attention, and sucks you into the vacuum of a peptide induced fancy. Those memories with their chemical makeup in tow, open an opportunity to look out the window through the core of self. Like a sugar high obsessive runs into compulsive while you feel, and then those glances can become added value. The value has to be contextualized for it to go from the pile of emotional existence into the realm of expression and growth, rather successful or not, is not as important as to begin the journey of self and understanding what this added value means.
Feeling sucked into the vacuum. A computer generated vortex of irrational drama, pausing in-between to contemplate what is around you, the realization that feeling alone is lovingly occupying space in time, and interacting with such space to interpret and understand what you see. The restlessness of finding out what drives the compulsive act of documenting with a camera, and when the shutter goes off there is no measure of value that can be applied to your subconscious intentions. But it is clear this conscious act is a re-arrangement of what goes underneath, consciously value adding a learned aesthetic arrangement to that impulse. In the end you decide what the desire adds and what it destroys.
Shultzville 4/13/2019
The Subjective /portraits.
Portraiture is an interpretive of the artist, the subject only becomes by whim of the artist. A process that starts with want becomes have and somewhere in the middle get makes an appearance to accomplish this transformation. The dynamic of get… You get the subject’s agreement for having their picture taken, you will the subject and camera to get something back… and… then… then you get to have it! In a portraiture session the artist has a universe of choice and the subject participates or not. Within this dynamic there is a play of power that allows for the portraitist to walk away with a have, I will write more about this in another post.
The portrait can’t escape the gravity of its own weight, and for me the snap comes at the moment of surrender. Surrender through connection and project a self into a record of that instance, it being a highly stylized image using elements to convey an emotive circumstance, or documenting an environmental depiction of the subject. In both cases elements become the portrait as much as the main subject in it, if present and not necessarily mutually excluding. And those elements are as much part of the portrait as the what is being revealed by a snap inside an intentional frame, these are just choices made, and in varying degrees the sum makes the portrait successful or not. The contents of frame can always be reduced to a subjective assessment of value, the choice is open to interpretation when the parts are scrutinized individually, and as a whole. What matters is the presence of the artist and the subject in the final image, all elements combine to give an impression that can or not be what was set out to do in the first place.
Thank you for the trust eBird!
Rhinebeck 3/1/2019
The level on my camera is just as important as the frame but not always. I get an immediate satisfaction to see the white line across my viewfinder suddenly go green, nudge it to the right then nudge it back in small bits, at level it turns green as if the world becomes right for pressing the shutter at the green go moment. Obsessive compulsive behavior at more levels that is perceptible, the green GO helps my wide angle lens tame perspective by making some parts of the image equidistant to the focal plane.
I am old enough to have relied on physical levels do do the same on an analog device, or even metaphorically bend the camera to visually achieve the same result, so that makes me ponder if this is just an old habit, therefore having technology built into your viewfinder that does the same thing is just a quick fix to my equidistant addiction. In retrospect it is a style element incorporated into the act of choosing the frame and how elements inside relate to each other.
The beauty of the exercise is that I can take it or leave it, some pictures simply don’t want to go that way. Again reinforcing this idea of using elements of style to conform the image before me, but more importantly it is through this exercise that my connection to the subject exists. You move up, or down, closer, farther and take the picture. A subjective exercise through objective devices, a picture therefore becomes subjective, an interpretation, a work of self expression.
CDMX 3/14/2019
Onto CDMX
time passing in between to get there
Tine in between /things-found
About an hour left in between now and then, once more waiting to board a plane taking me back to CDMX. To actively wait by filling the space observing light, then predicting how the lens will translate that same space into a representation. It’s been longer than a year since I last engaged in distant travel, yes I have gone back and forth for many visits… But that is where I belong in this timeline prescription for life, there are moments of reflection, and then a flick of the camera’s on-switch.
…following that prescribed life
…. and the time in between
It comes from following that prescribed life, and the time in between while the parts unravel, allowing me to snap those moments you can look at in this site’s /things-found. Just like everyone else’s, my life timeline allows for in-between to manifest, there are no accidents, only spaces of consequence for the pictures to be contemplated and taken. Perhaps what drives making the picture is the creeping mood of loneliness and connection, the spaces that allow my experience to transcend in an instant, a conscious snap of the shutter. There is no explicit direction, just things that evoke easing into my rhythms.
It ends with the flick to the off-switch, nothing more to see… Onto CDMX.
JFK 3/11/2019