PhotoYear in review
This was exhausting…but now I can sleep.
I wish I'd done a lot of things. I wish I'd printed more. I wish I'd taken more verticals instead of horizontals. I wish I did less with abstracted imagery and more with people.
But when it comes down to it, what I did was pretty damn awesome.
52 weeks, 52 rolls of film, some discrepancies here and there with when some rolls got finished and how well some rolls developed...but like I said a few days back, a flawed success. But when is a success ever not flawed?
The best thing about the project, I think, is the way I captured the city of Philadelphia in 2006…the memorial for the shooting victim, the Italian Market crab truck, the steps at UCity's Sitar India, the Chinese New Year festivities and the men's room graffiti at Kingdom of Vegeterians.
Grumblings and self-deprication aside, I think I did a great job with those pesky abstracts - come on, how cool was that ceiling lamp picture? And contrary to what I said before, I got some fine people shots - I dig what I did with the woman in the Uncle Sam hat walking in front of the Constitution Center, or the guy apparently levitating on top of the creek at Folk Fest. I love how I've developed this innate ability to find an incorrectly-viewed image out of the corner of my eye, or a strange juxtaposition and capture it before I know what I'm doing. So many of these shots I wound up liking this year were toss-offs, ostensible misfires. Strange how that works.
On the other hand, I found that shooting in a pinch - rushing to finish a roll on a Saturday, as I did entirely too often - produced uninspired blah images of gas containers, Bell jars, steel girders and drunk friends. Which is a point in itself...shooting photos while drunk produces poor results.
Had I to do it over again...or maybe going forward in my future shooting, rather...I wouldn't put such pressure on myself to shoot a certain per-week quota. That way I don't take crappy shots in the process of rushing, wasting money on that roll of film and wasting the time and energy it took to develop / view / scan it.
But enough about me. What's everybody else think?
You can view all my PhotoYear work in one grouping by clicking the photoyear2k6 tag.
In other news, I've got a bunch of color digital shots to post from circa New Year's. Once I do that later this week, I'm taking a well-deserved break from No Pop, No Style at large. We'll reconvene in February.