A blog about photography & transformative art
If you walk around your neighborhood long enough you begin to see things that casual observers cannot. There are boundaries and borders that are invisible to most, but can be clearly sensed on daily walks. Friendly milestones are everywhere; old parked cars, favorite trees, crooked telephone poles. The familiar is everywhere until you get to a busy street. Then there are the people that are passing through—in a hurry to get somewhere else.
A few hours ago I'd woken from one of those long dreams that consumes the night like a glowing-hot fever. Before retiring for the evening, I'd put the finishing touches on today's image. My work has been getting darker as of late, both literally and emotionally. While working on it, the image felt dreamlike, a journey into shadow. It must have activated something because the dream was very much as you see it in the photo.
Somewhere on the side of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County is a ranger's office. The office was closed last Friday when I peered into its window. Inside was a sad collection of stuffed birds. I questioned why an office dedicated to the appreciation of nature would have a collection of dead animals in it. Taxidermy is an odd thing. I wonder how people would view it if we started stuffing dead humans for display?
Dreams and photographs are of the same stuff. The surrealists knew this. To me, the act of photography is like dreamwalking. Tapping into the dream state while walking around with a camera isn't as hard as it might sound. The creative process itself is part dream, part reality, part substance, part essence.
I never feel more alive than when I've found a place and time to photograph. Something rings in my head, like the bell of a boxing match. I know that the light and time and place have all cooperated at that very moment to present me with a unique image, never to be repeated and soon gone forever. I feel it in my gut. I have but a moment. Sometimes I fumble with my camera, cursing it under my breathe. Like my own cold fingers on a frigid day, it initially won't cooperate. Then we settle in and make the image. Sometimes it works, sometimes, back in the studio, it's a huge disappointment. The clinical transferral of life to two-dimensional plane is often fraught with miscalculation.
I've lived in Marin County, California for some 29 years. In that time I've met and married my wife, been promoted and fired, lost most of my hair, and had several midlife crises along with a couple significant reminders of my mortality. All in all a heady run down the river-rapids of life.
I needed to get out of the studio after a long week, so I went for a hike yesterday with a good friend and my camera—the recipe for a perfect day. Here in Marin County, California, we are blessed with magnificent trails. Sometimes, when destinations are too close to home we take them for granted. They lose their exotic quality and become too familiar. It is an aspect of human nature that frustrates me. I wish it were easier to see my quotidian world from a fresher perspective.
By the time my new website was up my mind was thrashed. I asked myself; is this about HTML and CSS coding or is it about art? I often ask a similar question when physically installing a show. There are so many details that seem unrelated to the art itself. Hanging nails aren't really that different than an HTML tag. The stuff can be annoyingly finicky but if we want our art out in the world, we have to learn to present it properly and with the same care with which we initially made it. And that is as demanding as making the work in the first place.
Yesterday I just finished designing and developing my new web site. It was an exhausting process that consumed me towards the end. Late in the afternoon, unshaven and bleary-eyed, I uploaded the files to my server and, like wizardry, the site went live.
Most of the work I do in photomontage is a mystery. I find photos of enigmatic and interesting characters, live with them, file them, bring them out again, digitize them and restore them. Then one day, one (or more) of the characters speak to me. Then I move them into a new world of my imagination. Years ago they'd probably have medicated me (or maybe worse). Today I'm just an eccentric artist.
