A blog about photography & transformative art
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Self-Portrait
Summer is a season that makes me want to hide. I cannot seem to escape a sun that is now high and white. And bright. For someone who lives in the shadow, the brightness is almost debilitating. I have come to embrace my hypersensitivity to light and to use it as part of my artistic process. While high noon on a summer day can make for intensely boring photos, there is a searing saturation to the images of summer that I often like.
I get glued to this computer sometimes. My eyes stuck wide-open, frozen in a blinkless state, I feel like Alex from A Clockwork Orange in the scene where the reprogram him. Only, in my case, I don't have some creepy attendant putting tear solution in my eyes. "Blink!" I tell myself—always too late to do any good. By the time I actually do remember to blink, my eyelids feel like sandpaper.
As a self-conscious young man I never photographed myself. I was so painfully aware of myself and my camera I didn't even want to be <em>seen</em> let alone captured on film. With a camera dangling from my neck I felt more like a clumsy voyeur than an artist. It took me years to feel comfortable with a camera in my hands.
The Red Door Gallery & Collective in Oakland, California is opening its doors on Friday, October 3rd with a new show by Lauren Odell Usher and Heidi Forssel called *Look at Me Looking at You.* The show is brilliant and witty. I'm honored to have hung a couple prints as an adjunct to the show. If you are in the Oakland area on Friday night, please come see the show. It is at The Warehouse, 416 26th Street, Oakland, CA. The opening will be held from 6-9 PM.
I’ve always found it hard to be creative in broad daylight. Maybe I prefer living in the shadow. I’ve often described myself as a Moon Child rather than a Sun Child. This is all very odd behavior for someone who works with light, etching a facsimile of reality onto a silicon chip. No light, no image. Camera or no camera, I still like the dark.
