Auld Shtock

I've found myself, for one reason or another, looking at old photographs I took when I was still just getting into photography; these were taken with a Holga, a plastic piece of crap Chinese camera known for producing dreamlike, lo-fi photographs, though it's incredibly hit and miss.

I rarely got anything good out of the Holga; I put maybe a dozen rolls of film through it and I think the success rate was roughly two decent photos per roll. I just never really got the hang of it I suppose, and I never really bought into the whole aesthetic around it. But I did get some stuff I was happy with, and I enjoyed experimenting with it; there's no danger of taking things too seriously when you're holding one.

I might give it another go come summer. It's best suited to bright weather when there's plenty of colour about (the built in colourflash on the model I got is pretty hideous, I wish I'd gone for one with a hotshoe) and I think cross-processed slide film is the way to go. Though I might find my lo-fi aspirations have been spoiled by having used a (borrowed) Mamiya and a (also borrowed) Hasselblad...

G'night

 

I love a contact sheet

Contact sheets are my favourite things to make in a darkroom. The photographs are so small you can't really see the imperfections that you know are there and you will eventually see when you enlarge them. On the contact sheet every image looks like a perfect little self-contained universe, neatly arranged and segmented along with the others around it. They tell a story in a way the single image can only really hint at - like the short synopses you'd read at the start of each chapter of old adventure novels. Plus, they're real easy to make and sort of satisfy the need for instant gratification...

These are all quite badly 'scanned' (I just photographed them with a digital camera), hopefully I'll get to use the scanner at school and get some decent files, but for now I just want to make sure I've recorded them. The one above is about the trip I took to Limerick and Cork supporting the 202s and Patrick Kelleher. About half the images were destroyed either by my increasingly fault-ridden camera or just by a freak roll of film, which is pretty disappointing but I'm happy with what wasn't destroyed.  

Christmas at home, taken with a borrowed camera.

I had the idea one day when I was home and killing time before work to just quickly take vertical photographs of windows, but it branched out to include rivers and archway entrances, and then I kind of forgot about the windows a bit. I had the resulting contact sheet in mind; I think I liked the idea of applying uniformity to subjects that were only tenuously related... I had the word 'Ways' in my head while doing it. It was fun, running around trying to spot specific subjects, and I tried to continue taking only vertical photos for the rest of the roll, though I obviously forgot what I was doing at one point.  

Night and the Lights

I've been working on this for a few weeks now and I'm finding it difficult to articulate what it is exactly I'm doing. Sometimes it seems to be referring to cinematic light, or the lighting you'd find in a photographic studio. But it's always found lighting, and the things that become lit are given this odd sort of significance; as if they were meant to be there, and are in some way important. It's led me to wonder what it is exactly that lighting bestows on a person or object or space, why it has this power to lend significance. I've photographed these scenes wherever a certain kind of lighting occurs and the things that are lit are supposedly insignificant - rubbish, posts, gates, trees (possibly too many trees...), bushes, gutters, the ground even. I like the idea that, in a way, it's naturally occuring, yet inherently artificial.

As I do more research on photographers that have influenced me or new photographers that have explored similar themes I find myself increasingly becoming alternately inspired and confused. More ideas are generated but this leads to a muddying of intentions, so I sometimes feel like I'm losing track of the point. But it seems to be coming together a little more recently. Writing this stuff helps.

Related to this idea I think is the idea of disconnection when taking a photograph... I haven't thought about this properly yet but I've had to take photos recently of photo-books for projects and such. It's strange how easy it is to forget that the subject is this amazing work by an artist you love and admire when all you're looking at is how well exposed the image is, if the page around it is white or off-white, whether the page is in focus etc and you just don't see a great photographer's work, all you see is a set of criteria. I also feel that when taking a person's photograph there's a sense of scaling the person down, almost turning them into the same set of criteria by which you'd judge any other photograph. It's like micro-managing the world or something...

So this relates to this project in the sense that I'm sort of confronting a fear (the dark) by placing it in the confined context of a photograph, where everything is managed and controlled, where the attention is drawn, 

momentarily, to the photograph of the surroundings and away from the surroundings themselves. It's like dealing with a difficult situation by avoidance, or even denial. And when it's a digital photo it becomes all the more immediate and powerful. I watched a guy take a photo recently; I saw him see the scene (a building beside a river); then stop; then take out the camera; focus, adjust; take the photo; then walk away looking at the photo on the back of the camera. I watched him till he was out of sight and not once did he look back at the building. He'd captured the sight/site and stored it for later perusal, safe in the knowledge that the camera would do his remembering for him. In this way his world is managed, memory and experience almost usurped by record and document. It's a dislocation of your emotions where you choose when to remember and define your experience by looking at images displayed on a glowing rectangle.

homesounds

Rest bite

I really haven't got the time to be making this post but what the heck; if you can't have a biscuit with your tea then something something something free.

   

More from those couple of rolls of last year.

These three I suppose are of pretty significant occurrences/non-occurrences, for an assortment of reasons, none of them overly pertinent to... anyone? Nevertheless, the photos were taken and still exist.

This week, I have been mostly reading too much about ROBERT FRANK. For an oral presentation I have to give tomorrow. Though he is legendary and amazing and tragic and gifted I've had only a week to prepare this thing and most of those days were spent in buses/work/practice/gig/buses
[or is it "busses"? "Buses" makes me think it's pronounced like Gary Busey].
Hence the lack of time.
The high of an excellent gig/night had completely dissipated by yesterday morning, to be replaced by a sort of grim and petty irritation, giving way to outright joylessness and curmudgeonability. PLUS IT'S STILL REALLY COLD WHAT THE HELL.  But I digress/depress. More gigs in Cork and Limerick and I'm excited and buoyed, like an exciting buoy. And a friend has promised some free film for me this week! YESSS.