I am in the middle of an epic multitasking session. I am at my second job at a sports channel, with a live broadcast going, while my laptop screen is split between a text editor and the new season of “Andor” playing.
On the way to work I listened to a recording of the new pope, Leo XIV making his first speech the other day, after his election. I am mourning the end of a momentus event that I didn’t get to be a part of.
The morning Pope Francis died, as I was drinking my morning cofee and reading the news, I remember feeling very clearly that I was supposed to be in Rome. I felt called or something like that. A calm, obvious feeling: this is important, this is happening at a particular time in a particular place and I’m supposed to be a part of that.
Then of course I didn’t go. I am not in a place financially to do something like this and I was just about to start in a new job so this wasn’t the time for me to up and go to camp out in St. Peter’s square for weeks, documenting the mourning, the period of the conclave, the people gathered from all over the world, in a community of faith and expectation and overwhelming emotion. The moment Leo XIV stepped out onto the loggia to give his first Urbi et Orbi blessing, I knew this chance was gone for good. A moment has ended, a chapter has closed, and time began to move forward. Sede vacante, an “empty chair”, felt somehow personal to me.
I’m thinking about how I work with my photo library. Currently I have a master Lightroom catalog with every image from 2019 to today in it, with the raw files spread across three external drives. A fourth drive holds exported jpegs, in a folder structure mirroring that of the raws.
This system feels fragile. A monolithic catalog, no way to put away drives with old images I don’t use. The reason is that my portfolio and project selects are only reliably collected as collections in this catalog.
So now I’m trying to come up with a new structure, with spearate catalogs by year, and a new library of “positives” - exported files, organized in some way so that can become my primary collection of work.
Meanwhile, Lightroom catalogs will serve for selecting and processing files, but ones things are exported, the catalogs of raws will not be touched again unless I need to make new exports.
I’m finding this difficult, my mind is not clear, and this seems at the same time very simple and very complex. I’ll need to keep thinking.
Well, anyways.
I found a new photographer today, someone pretty well known in Instagram street photo circles, but previously unknown to me. His name is Jeremy Paige and he goes by eatenbyflowers.
His photos are often confrontational. His website is headed with “It’s Easier to Ask For Forgiveness Than It Is To Get Permission”.
Eatenbyflowers made me think of my own street photography. I see folks like Jeremy and many others doing things so brave and brazen with the camera that the act of taking that picture becomes the art itself. It’s like performance art where the performance is getting an inch from someone’s face and taking a picture.
This picture is a good example.
When I see photography like this, I feel an urge to follow suite. I feel like I need to run out the door, waving my camera around, dancing around people, like a weird jester. It feels like a dance, street photography, when it works. It feels transgressive, too, rude and offensive and even unethical, like a thing only a priviliged person would do. It’s like the old idea of a photograph stealing the person’s soul somehow.
I sit with these feelings, the urge to do something that I also feel I shouldn’t, something impolite, something that actively disregards other people’s feelings and rights about being (or not being) photographed. I sit with the feeling that I fundamentally dislike Bruce Gilden, as a person, solely for the way he photographs people.
Then I think of Martin Parr.
Parr does a lot of similar things. He gets close, he photographs people he thinks weird, he laughs at people with his photos. (Often he laughs with them, but he laughs at, too.) But Martin Parr seems to be a nice, kind, loving person. He laughs like you laugh at a friend spilling a drink on themselves. It’s the joy of witnessing a loveable, fallible human being.
Looking back on this era we live in, we will probably call it the age of AI, or the dawn of AI, or the something else of AI. But AI is for sure at the core of what’s changing and how. So is social media, so is post-truth, so are many other things that all result in the same thing: something being true isn’t enough anymore. It might not even be relevant.
The various branches of documentary photography (photojournalism, street photography, etc.) have long relied for their value on the fact that they show some form of truth or reality. It’s interesting, because this person actually exists. It’s interesting, because this place in the mountains of Kazakhstan exists and looks like it does in the picture, at the same time that I’m sitting in a different place, looking at the picture. But something being real doesn’t matter anymore, or at least it doesn’t make an image special or interesting in any way.
So what happens to documentary photography when the fact that it documents isn’t enough anymore? I think Gilden, and Winogrand, (and a little bit Parr, too), and many others point us to an answer: the interaction between photographer and unwitting subject, between photographer and life is what makes it something worth looking at.
Like performance art.
So at the end of this, I am here, having convinced myself that the thing I deep down want to do and also feel I shouldn’t, is actually the ONLY thing, the MOST valuable thing I can do. Neat, huhh? Probably a coincidence.
Well, anyways.