Today I’m thinking about what I feel is worth or not worth photographing.
I have a deep sense that things need to be worthy to be photographed, that they need to Matter in some way.
But that is, I think, a false beliefe born from a desire for establisent acceptance and for an easy explanation in every moment for why I am doing what I’m doing.
I need to stop thinking of myself as a Photographer. I am just a guy and photographing things helps me make sense of the world. So I photograph things that catch my attention or that I find curious in some way. That should be enough, that is supposed to be enough.
I want to stop thinking about results and meaning and reception and respectability.
I have skills that the average amateur doesn’t, so I can make good images. I want to use that skill but lose the seriousness, and just play and shoot and catch life. I want to have fun, without thinking about where that image fits in a larger vody of work or in a career.
Well, anyways.
Big TIL for me: in Markdown you can end a line with two or more trailing spaces and hit new line/enter
to produce a line break!!
My main thing today:
Not much time to explain stuff, but I have two photobook reviews here that left a big impression
on me today. Both by Jörg Colberg, both about (beyond the photobook they are critiquing)
the obsession of most of photo-world, most mid-level photographers like myself anyway, with
the fact that cameras can record a very short moment. Like just because the camera is good at
that, that’s all photography should be focused on. Street and documentary work especially,
my own work even more so.
Many thoughts, not much time, here are the articles:
Ambience Decay
Splinter
Go read them.
Well, anyways.
Always a fucking demand. I feel like all day every day all I experience is getting
my attention yanked this way or that by everyone and everything. People, pets, friends,
loved ones, tools, systems, tasks, the bin, my home, everything just yanks me randomly.
“Pay attention to me, do this now, not that, do that now, not this, come here, go there,
be present, be practical, be emotional, be fun, be serious, now, now, now, now!”
It never fucking stops.
Why do I experience so many things as demands? It honestly feels like that.
This must be an ADHD thing, feeling like I’m holding onto whatever’s going on in my mind
at the moment and suddenly - YANK! Some external force pulls me away and I watch my
attention fall away with whatever my mental state was and now I’m confused, like
a sleepwalker that just woke up in the middle of the garden. But the demands don’t stop,
they expect me to be immediately ready to engage, and I’m just blinking there, groggy,
and I try to force myself to grab onto the new thing, to be present, to focus, to do,
say, listen, operate, think.
But that’s not how it works, is it. I can’t just grab on, on demand. That’s kind of the
point of ADHD. Grabbing on is automatic, I can’t directly control it. Like that scammy
grabbing machine game, where you have some control over the arm, but when and where it
grabs isn’t up to you. So I jostle the joystick, try to move myslef into a good position
so that if and when the grabbing happens, I’ll be aiming where I need to be. But it’s not
a sure thing and I am annoyed and angry and ashamed, because the Demands need me to
nail it and nail it now and I just can’t. I try and I try and I cry with frustration
but the arm won’t be dictated to, not even by me.
Well, anyways.