I feel pretty confident of my ability to frame a snapshot of a flat snapshot. I’m back to trying to understand how deeper things flatten in the camera. I suppose at some point I should learn how to represent depth well, but for now, I’m just trying to flatten more and more. In this case, I think I took it to an absurd degree. This is a light fixture on a pipe sticking out of a wall about a foot below a medallion.
Me: Hold on. Glove.
Flora: Daddy, you don’t have to take a picture.
Me: No, I don’t have to. I’m going to.
Flora: Same thing.
I’m looking mostly for provocation to see myself differently. My life has changed a lot lately, and now I need to make even bigger changes. I’m exhausted emotionally and spending most of my time seeing how high and how low the mood swings can go.
I have enough to think about when I walk and though I’m looking, I’m not giving myself the opportunity to see. I snap pictures without really acknowledging what I’m looking at, or thinking about what they mean. After I loose the context and I see them on the screen, I give myself the time then, and I get it, sometimes.
After photographing thousands of gloves over several years, I can’t recall ever seeing a removed glove finger all alone. Yesterday I saw the one on the left one block away from my house. The one on the right I saw yoday about twenty five blocks away.
Please make up a meaning.
Where and how I fit in has been in a swirl lately. I’ve had plenty to think about, too much to think about.
Normally I look for signs to provoke new thought and to think differently. The most striking things I see now are those that stop thought. A light pole on a freeway bridge next to a bus stop has a twisted, half-painted ground wire. It’s home enough for a cluster of moss. It’s home enough to say ‘shhhhh’.
I was listening to Memo From Turner downtown. In between verses a 60s woman walked past and began speaking. I turned to see her among seven or eight bike staples, asking “Is this where I tie up my horse?” Then turning her head upward to ask the clouds threatening rain “IS THIS WHERE I TIE UP MY HORSE?”
(No photo, so here’s a traffic cone.)
I was wandering around, waiting for the phone to ring when I found a great place to talk. As soon as I saw the bench, I saw the coyote. It walked by the bench and then into cover and turned to look at me. I was able to get the camera out before it left.
The space others leave behind by others can welcome us in ways solitude can’t. Knowing that the coyote had been there seconds before made the phone ring clearer and my greeting stronger.
I’m normally pretty good at making up some sort of symbolic meaning for the junk I find. I’m coming up with nothing solid for this.
It’s a Stanley planer, made in England. I’d guess it’s about 50 years old. Though the blade seems relatively new and sharp the rest is rusty. It appears that the front handle fell off a long time ago.
I’ll take any suggestion. All I’m imagining is “making things flat” and that is uninspiring.
I gained some resolve recently. I’m not sure how, but it feels good. At the moment it hit I was between appointments, rushing between pleasures, a little lost and late.
I saw this toy sword on the cramped landscaping of some business or another (a car lot, I think). The blade in the sun and the handle in the shade. Which to choose.