A study in blue, pictures of the way things aren't
Photography is the bastard child of science, left on the doorstep of art -- Beaumont Newhall
I've spent the past month or so using an upcoming gallery show I highly doubt my work will get in to kick myself into high gear about taking my art - particularly my photography - more seriously. The show is specifically an alternative-process photography one, and the deadline for submissions is in two days. My usual method of using a short-term deadline to kickstart myself into high gear usually works but then results in my being burned out by the project by the time the deadline rolls around, after which the whole art/craft form retreats to the back of my mind while its equipment lounges around in my basement. Not so much this time.
I've been dreaming about elements of the darkroom process. I am half-waking at five o'clock in the morning wondering whether I am sleeping on the right side or will the negative be disastrously flipped. I am coming up with projects I know will take me longer to learn than I have time within my deadline, and I am not yet discouraged. I am finally pragmatically planning making more room in the basement for trays of noxious chemicals, for processes that are not just the silvertone mainstream photography has passed by in favor of digital colour, but ones that are more finicky, more time-consuming, that produce unreal colours, that require being out in the sun. I am plotting a workshop at a local arts festival. I am building pinhole cameras out of papercraft kits and begging bigger ones out of the Fine German Engineer-artist who encouraged me into photography in the first place. Yes, over time, I'll back off and not be spending fifteen hours a week puttering on the deck and taking over the kitchen with trays of water, peroxide, tea, coffee, ferrocyanide and watercolour paper. But I think I've finally got myself stuck on it.
It's machineofdoom's fault, really. That's the Fine German Engineer turned photographer (Science Artist) I met when I was desperately spending my time constructing costumes in the theatre to get away from computers and start using the other half of my brain than my Computer Science degree required. Over the past decade, she has encouraged me to keep shooting (the only way to get better), to research artists who are already doing what I want to (which is not 'just copying'), to provide company in the alt-process darkroom at our old college and try a couple of my own prints (the first one's free), and to bother submitting work even to local unjuried fundraiser shows in order to gain confidence and learn the process. Tori is also a dishearteningly exact technical genius to work beside, a thorough researcher who already knows the names of everyone in contemporary photography doing what one is fumbling at, and exactly as harsh a critic as one asks for. Inspiration and intimidation in one big queer Teutonic package. And still, at the end of the day, when I despair over work I see online, in textbooks on the subject, Tori is the first person to remind me people have been doing this for decades longer than I have, and I learn fast.
So somehow, this time, I'm not dissuaded. For one thing, in my thirties I'm finally coming to believe I can get that much better if, and only if, I bother trying. For another, I'm reveling in a tiny corner of a technical art form where excellence can come of zen brushwork, simplistic forms, and gross errors just as much as meticulous eyedropper-mixed chemistry and fickle weather-dependent processing. It's a corner where the interplay of medium and subject can introduce layers of meaning into the simplest of pieces. It's a corner that rejects the clean perfection of digital imagery and deigns to go back to hand-made organic forms. Even if there is a digital step in each piece - and for my work there almost always is - the end product is lovingly hand-produced, away from the keyboard.
As I explained to a friend recently, what had caused my photography hobby to stagnate was that I got tired of taking digital pictures of things that were really there. This isn't.
I've spent the past month or so using an upcoming gallery show I highly doubt my work will get in to kick myself into high gear about taking my art - particularly my photography - more seriously. The show is specifically an alternative-process photography one, and the deadline for submissions is in two days. My usual method of using a short-term deadline to kickstart myself into high gear usually works but then results in my being burned out by the project by the time the deadline rolls around, after which the whole art/craft form retreats to the back of my mind while its equipment lounges around in my basement. Not so much this time.
I've been dreaming about elements of the darkroom process. I am half-waking at five o'clock in the morning wondering whether I am sleeping on the right side or will the negative be disastrously flipped. I am coming up with projects I know will take me longer to learn than I have time within my deadline, and I am not yet discouraged. I am finally pragmatically planning making more room in the basement for trays of noxious chemicals, for processes that are not just the silvertone mainstream photography has passed by in favor of digital colour, but ones that are more finicky, more time-consuming, that produce unreal colours, that require being out in the sun. I am plotting a workshop at a local arts festival. I am building pinhole cameras out of papercraft kits and begging bigger ones out of the Fine German Engineer-artist who encouraged me into photography in the first place. Yes, over time, I'll back off and not be spending fifteen hours a week puttering on the deck and taking over the kitchen with trays of water, peroxide, tea, coffee, ferrocyanide and watercolour paper. But I think I've finally got myself stuck on it.
It's machineofdoom's fault, really. That's the Fine German Engineer turned photographer (Science Artist) I met when I was desperately spending my time constructing costumes in the theatre to get away from computers and start using the other half of my brain than my Computer Science degree required. Over the past decade, she has encouraged me to keep shooting (the only way to get better), to research artists who are already doing what I want to (which is not 'just copying'), to provide company in the alt-process darkroom at our old college and try a couple of my own prints (the first one's free), and to bother submitting work even to local unjuried fundraiser shows in order to gain confidence and learn the process. Tori is also a dishearteningly exact technical genius to work beside, a thorough researcher who already knows the names of everyone in contemporary photography doing what one is fumbling at, and exactly as harsh a critic as one asks for. Inspiration and intimidation in one big queer Teutonic package. And still, at the end of the day, when I despair over work I see online, in textbooks on the subject, Tori is the first person to remind me people have been doing this for decades longer than I have, and I learn fast.
So somehow, this time, I'm not dissuaded. For one thing, in my thirties I'm finally coming to believe I can get that much better if, and only if, I bother trying. For another, I'm reveling in a tiny corner of a technical art form where excellence can come of zen brushwork, simplistic forms, and gross errors just as much as meticulous eyedropper-mixed chemistry and fickle weather-dependent processing. It's a corner where the interplay of medium and subject can introduce layers of meaning into the simplest of pieces. It's a corner that rejects the clean perfection of digital imagery and deigns to go back to hand-made organic forms. Even if there is a digital step in each piece - and for my work there almost always is - the end product is lovingly hand-produced, away from the keyboard.
As I explained to a friend recently, what had caused my photography hobby to stagnate was that I got tired of taking digital pictures of things that were really there. This isn't.