on knowing photographers, or how the whole internet might see your kitchen naked
catvalente wrote some time ago about the dangers of being involved with a writer, that they will take bits of you, and bits of your life, maybe mix and match them just enough to obscure what parts are whose, then hang them up for the whole world to see. She wrote this, I believe, while working on Deathless, which may be my favourite novel ever simply for punching me directly in my own issues, my own kinks, and my deep abiding love for historically twisted myth, so very beautifully. And, from what little I know of her own life and her dear justbeast's from reading her books and her blog and meeting them both ever so briefly at a Saloncon once upon a time through mutual friends, I can see just enough pieces of people to feel like I'm prying on too much of their personal lives by reading her work not in a contextless vacuum.
These words of hers, on the danger of people being shared as words in art, come back to me often when I am being most serious about my photography. It isn't that I shoot many portraits: the inner world I translate through photographs of the one cameras can record is very sparsely populated, half faerieland and half The World Without Us post-apocalyptic abandonment. But to be close to a photographer is to be captured at random moments when you are expressing yourself the most, or the least, trying on identities or simply incidentally standing under magically unreal lighting. To adventure with a photographer is to indirectly tell the world where you've been, when, with whom, and to have some of your shared secret places given away. If your own face is never shown to the world, or your partner's, your kitchen may still be, and it will say things about you no portrait of a body could.
I've been taking my art more seriously this year of personal upheaval, but I've been sharing less and less of the parts that disclose even the slightest of other people's secrets. I've tried to live like a writer avoiding using parts of anyone I actually know. Unsurprisingly, other than the Icons project, that hasn't been conducive to producing and sharing anything meaningful. I'll keep working on that one, but otherwise, well, my friends and loves and tribe, you have been warned. That is how sharing our out-of-phase view of the world works, it's where the magic comes from in our art of magic and math, and no matter what major project we are working on at any given time, it becomes a way of life. If you have let a photographer into your house, even if they are not at that time working on a deep meaningful home-life-related project, eventually strangers will see your kitchen naked. On my side of the rarely-spoken deal, I will do my best to make it shine.
These words of hers, on the danger of people being shared as words in art, come back to me often when I am being most serious about my photography. It isn't that I shoot many portraits: the inner world I translate through photographs of the one cameras can record is very sparsely populated, half faerieland and half The World Without Us post-apocalyptic abandonment. But to be close to a photographer is to be captured at random moments when you are expressing yourself the most, or the least, trying on identities or simply incidentally standing under magically unreal lighting. To adventure with a photographer is to indirectly tell the world where you've been, when, with whom, and to have some of your shared secret places given away. If your own face is never shown to the world, or your partner's, your kitchen may still be, and it will say things about you no portrait of a body could.
I've been taking my art more seriously this year of personal upheaval, but I've been sharing less and less of the parts that disclose even the slightest of other people's secrets. I've tried to live like a writer avoiding using parts of anyone I actually know. Unsurprisingly, other than the Icons project, that hasn't been conducive to producing and sharing anything meaningful. I'll keep working on that one, but otherwise, well, my friends and loves and tribe, you have been warned. That is how sharing our out-of-phase view of the world works, it's where the magic comes from in our art of magic and math, and no matter what major project we are working on at any given time, it becomes a way of life. If you have let a photographer into your house, even if they are not at that time working on a deep meaningful home-life-related project, eventually strangers will see your kitchen naked. On my side of the rarely-spoken deal, I will do my best to make it shine.