Sunday, April 11, 2010

Not Leaving Town

I've been home for two weeks, and am leaving tomorrow evening. Contrary to an earlier post I've decided to move back here; for the summer, to work and earn money to buy/replace/repair the stuff I've (ab)used these last few months i.e broken keyboards, wonky guitar, iffy cameras, maladjusted computer, hole-ridden shoes, the list goes on and on and on until it breaks too.

What I do after the summer is anyone's guess. I don't want to get stuck into the same routine I've been in the last few years. I don't know if I'll study photography further, probably not. I'll concentrate more on music, more gigs and more recording. I might move somewhere else. Everywhere seems the same the same. I want to explore this country, then get out, sometimes. Other times I don't want to go anywhere, or I want to be anywhere other than wherever it is I am, sometimes I feel both states, and a sort of paralysis sets in. The burden of choice and the chains of indecision. Really I'm just lazy I suppose, through and through.

These last few days threw up several reminders of what I dislike about living here, but I'm fairly positive the negative aspects are outweighed by the other.
I should come up with plans now, and set about implementing them properly in the summer. I am completely terrible at making plans.

I took a couple of rolls worth of photos while here; I'll hopefully get to develop them at school on Monday.

These photos are from a walk home from school one evening last month; I was for some reason in high spirits and pretty trigger happy. I thought it would be interesting to take photos of the various kinds of pole I encountered along the route home, I think maybe to see if it would actually be interesting to look at. Because y'know, they're just poles. But there's lots of them.
 

















 
















































 








I've been exposed to lots of different works these last few months and often a series of photographs will contain very closely related variations on a given theme and I've gotten to wondering about the nature of interest and how it's propagated in a series; I think the interest lies in the viewer being presented not with the simple fact of individual images or subjects but how those subjects relate to each other in series. There's a certain satisfaction I think in drawing comparisons between related things. The best example I can think of is Mary Ellen Mark's series on twins, where the subjects inhabiting the frame are defined by their status as twins but always there are subtle differences that set them apart as individuals. In their respective stance, posture, expression and demeanour the twins manage to subvert their terms of reference, staking their claim as individuals even in the context of extreme similarity and Mark reiterates this in each successive photo. She doesn't focus on her subjects' similarities as twins but on their differences as individuals.