It's Not Like I'm Posessed Or Anything,

I just do...



...My...



...Job

--Pete Townshend.

Unhappiness Is An Invented Thing

Dominique



Dear Dom,

So sorry. You've become one of my favorite people to photograph. I should have warned you that this might happen.

--RG

Archiving

A couple of oldies while I wait for the Powers film to come back:





I was scanning some negatives and trolling through my archives (which is no small task considering how poorly organized they are) and happened across these two. I have the second one framed in my apartment, and the other I always meant to, but never got around to it.

I took these in 2002, I think, and never printed them myself in any form, so any sort of work I did with them at the time was limited to the quick prints from the lab. These are about as sentimental as I get when it comes to photography (see previous discussion here) and about as sentimental as I get about California and Santa Barbara in general. My pithy comment is always that Santa Barbara and I have "...reconciled [our] relationship" and I guess that's more true than not.

A side note: For whatever reason I didn't notice the biker riding away in the 'Jesus y Selena' picture until 2005 -- or three years after I took it. Sometimes you can see, but you may not observe.

Ironic Photos of Monticello New York Kennel Club Dog Show, Secaucus, NJ, 2007

This is another series that came about from a work situation, and the pictures I took might hint at my frame of mind more so than I'd like to make public. I speak of course about my great dislike of most people and fondness for animals, who are of course innocents in all of the nonsense of this world. And at the dog show, both my likes and dislikes collided in spectacular fashion.

There's a Bresson quote about a connection that needs to be made between "...the eye and the heart" and while it may be true, the question is what I see in my heart when I take something like this:



Bresson and Avedon and Penn and Edward Steichen and all the other great photographers had and have a great fondness for the people of this world and the connection to their place in it is what made and makes them great. My distrust and distaste for people shows through, I think, and I wonder if it holds me back creatively. Suze (see previous entry here), in one of her finer moments said that I can't take pretty pictures of people, that I took 'warts 'n' all' pictures and that my inability to do an unselfconciously flattering portrait was a great talent that I should embrace. It's all well and good, I suppouse, to be gifted (if true) with a predisposition to recognizing ugliness or some God-awful truth about humanity, but it doesn't really sell. Even Natchwey sees something beautiful in the struggle. I don't know if I do.

And back to my previous thoughts about the Flickr web-hit flow of traffic. Assume for a minute that I take unflattering pictures as a rule and that someday I am great at it -- I wonder if someone will see these pictures, and know a person in them and understand that I take unflattering pictures. Or if they'll see them, and ask they be taken down because of it.

Consider this my first submission.

I'll begin this weblog formally with a quote from Picasso, because I am very vain and yet (or because of it) my ego bruises easily,

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

To this end, I submit what I hope will be a series of ongoing projects and eratta that will be of some value to anyone who reads this. Please consider the portfolio portions of my site static and this fluid; This will be for working through and soliciting opinion. I begin with this,



I made you a triptych. It is entitled:

"An Unlikely Advance In Intercontinental Relations."

It is exotic and mysterious.