Saying "no" to models that want to get randy in front of my camera is something simply beyond my capability. But all of those things keep me from getting on to the next thing.
Hermits (Fashion Only Forum 3/6/01)
A long long time ago, a man wishing to isolate himself from the world would go to the wilderness and build a shed or find a cave where he could be alone and could contemplate the nature of God. Socrates thought the nature of the universe could be deduced completely inside the mind, without observation of the world at all. Religious hermits followed suit, thinking that by isolation and by having enough time to think without distraction, God's Will or Plan or Nature could be deduced through contemplation. Distraction is the enemy of serious thought.
Anyone with kids knows that distractions drive one to distraction. The world must then be viewed in soundbite-sized chunks as seeing of the whole is impossible - much less understanding.
On a lesser scale, thinking about the next work is interrupted by remnants of the last work. Requests to go back and shoot or submit or talk about night fashion interrupts club photography. Offers of pay for club work interfere with anything new. Girls wanting to shoot erotica again, when I'm really done with it, understandably distract me. And I can't bring myself to ignore the distractions. I love talking about the night fashion, as it's probably the best work I've ever done. And I love the recognition for the club work that money symbolizes (love the money too). Saying "no" to models that want to get randy in front of my camera is something simply beyond my capability. But all of those things keep me from getting on to the next thing.
Quoth Garbo, "I vant to be alone." Not quite. I don't want to be alone all the time. The company of friends, artists and free-thinkers is sometimes appreciated. Getting off the block on the new work is sometimes a result of something said, leading to a chain-reaction of associations yielding something I want to make. But talking about it isn't the same as doing it. "Photographer" is not the same as "man making photographs." Too often it's easier to be the former, resting on the old work, the old style, plagarizing one's self. To be the latter, one must gather the materials and make photographs, ideas, inspirations, or not. Sometimes in a lame effort to be the latter, I carry a camera around, and sometimes photograph my cat. But nothing comes of any of it.
Contrary to Socrates and the beliefs of the hermits, the universe or God cannot be understood without observation. Staying entirely inside one's head imposes the limits of the head. To understand the universe, it is necessary to observe the universe.
Sometimes a change of perspective (my old photo prof would say, "point-of-view") is necessary. The world is different when observed from my office desk. It's commercial, competative, and composed mostly of airplanes. Listening to BBC that same world consists of the Taliban, Indonesian and American politics and cricket. As a photographer my world is by choice a limited variety of young people. When I moved from the business of undersea warfare to aerospace, the world got drier. When I quit listening to AM talk radio, the world got bigger. When I started going to the clubs, I realized that what's routinely called "fashion" in no way reflects what people actually wear, and that rules of behaviour I'd grown up believing are completely arbitrary and capricious. Life isn't big enough to observe everything, but it's certainly big enough to observe more than I'd thought.
On another forum an erudite discussion of the validity of Steichen's Family of Man exhibit made the point that no sampling of any subject is by any means definitive. Some conclusions can be drawn, but they will always be in doubt. And nothing said about one instant will necessarily have validity the next instant. The picture above was critiqued as being a triple exposure, saying nothing about time, though the exposures were actually over a period of about four tenths of a second and therefore the picture is about time. What does it say about time? Someone else will have to figure that out. I was just trying to do something different - see something in another way. But it's nothing Muybridge didn't do earlier and better.
In my own photography there were three specific incidents that made me see things differently: a) photographing Leslie kicking a Coke machine at night and later realizing that there was nothing remotely like it on the web; b) walking into a Goth club and discovering a completely different world of behaviour and dress, and; c) tying up a naked model and seeing that it excited her. Each of these have led to new work. And each of these entailed risk and required a different point of view. The big question is how one goes about finding another different view when all the options seem to have been covered. But they haven't been covered, they are just not obvious.
Some of my personal dead ends: night fashion in black & white; simulated night fashion in the studio; wide angle lens use with night fashion; fetish/erotica in color; club work with a longer lens; club work with flash; documentary fashion; more extreme fetish; beauty photography. They don't work for me.
Anyone else go running down some deadends in pursuit of a different way of seeing? Anyone have a story about how they found something new?
-Don