Ode to a Scanner

I enjoy scanning photographs, I don't know why. Maybe it's because it reminds me of my early days of photographs - scanning my shiny new prints to upload them to lomography.com, seeing the photographs in a new light. Two new lights really - first you scan them, and they are different, lit up by thousands of little computer screen lights. Then you put them on the internet, and they acquire the veneer of a thing with the potential of being looked at by a huge number of people, visible anywhere and at any time. Suddenly it's not yours anymore. Your physical photographs, held in your hands and seen only by yourself and the person who printed and bagged them, are suddenly exposed and seem different, smaller somehow. I always feel this way when uploading photographs, same with music. There are obviously plenty of printed photos I've not put on the internet, but some prints I actually like I've never even scanned, and I don't think I ever will. I try not to be too sentimental about material objects (which to be honest is very difficult, I'm pretty materialistic), but with these photographs I think I'll keep them precious, visible only in one place and at one time.


With this in mind, I made some music based around the sound of the particular scanner I happen to be using at the moment (I've owned maybe four ever, all but the first one [which was my parents'] of them secondhand). It came from a charity shop and cost me two euros or something ludicrous. It's pretty banjaxed at this stage, and there's the tell-tale white line appearing on one side of the image. But it makes a great noise.

   Ode to a Scanner by DeclanQKelly

Atlast

I feel like every time I look at these photos I'm a little surprised, I don't know why. They're the last photographs I took while still living in Dublin, my last couple of weeks there, though some are from home also.

My most recent, long suffering pair of shoes, donated to the side of the river and the world, generally.

A long walk and a high place.

Towards the end of the course I started taking the sort of photographs I was taking before; at least, it felt that way. Photographs that were not connected necessarily by theme, but more by mood or function; namely, these things I saw made me feel something and photographing them was an attempt to record that feeling. Or maybe an attempt to articulate that feeling in some way. Though I know it's inevitably futile, my response to these scenes now is, through the filter of memory, irrevocably changed. Still, what else can I do? I'd forget it completely otherwise.

One last trip to the Tesco down the road. Soon after taking this, the last frame of the roll of film, I saw a beautiful fox roaming the streets of an estate near my house. I stopped and watched him for a while, he spotted me at one point and stared hungrily back for a few seconds before slinking off behind a wall. I went home and ate whatever awful food I had, went to sleep and moved out the next day. I felt pretty good about that.

I'm very tired, but and but

Things are starting to get blurry.

Last couple of weeks of school and it's sandpaper-in-the-eyes and squinting-when-you-think time. Into the mix is moving my stuff back home the same way I moved it here; bit by bit in a rucksack on the bus every Friday. Also, there's an amazing enlarger going free from a college that doesn't want it anymore, all I have to do to get it is provide transportation, which is within reach. The flipping thing is almost eight feet tall and un-dismantleable, so my Dad (he of the infinite favours) is in touch with a guy who drives a van for a living, and makes regular-ish excursions up here and back. Now it's just a matter of aligning my schedule with his and with the contact at the college, which means many phone calls. I'm beginning to think that maybe my recent preoccupation with open van doors is a subconscious, primal yearning for a van of my own *sigh* and all the wondrous connotations of space and convenience they illicit. Also the ability to drive and a full licence would be nice/necessary. 

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...

Nab-Nabokov

Our current computer/photoshop project is for a book-cover design, so I went for the book I'm reading at the moment - 'Mary' by Vladimir Nabokov. He's got the oddest writing style - it's not overtly strange, just mildly unsettling, but in an entirely positive way, his books (especially his short stories) are generally really funny.
I'm useless at designing things from scratch. The whole process from idea to finished product has always been beyond me, try as I might. Which is maybe another reason I took up photography - a lot of the time the act of photographing is entirely reactionary, at least it is for me when I just wander around and find stuff. So I'm generally mystified by designers of any kind, people who can have an idea, visualise it and then execute it. But I'm happy with this so far - it's a little bit of a cheat in that I've used one of my own photographs (of a broken shop window) but I think it's justified. The idea behind it is sort of based on one particular scene in the book where a fight takes place and glass gets broken, and the narrator, Ganin, singles the event out as the beginning of the end of an intense relationship with the Mary of the title. Ganin lives in Berlin and spends much of his time reminiscing about Mary, wrapping the memories around himself and almost cocooning himself in them... I'm still not finished the book, so I don't know if the cover is finished yet either. Or maybe I'm taking it all too seriously...

Stranger and stranger

It's been pointed out to me that taking these kinds of photographs can be construed as creepy. I suppose I thought I would be immune to the accusation of invasion of privacy as I wasn't photographing the person's face, so they wouldn't be identifiable. But there's the odd reasoning that says it's still unethical, as the person has no chance of being aware they're being photographed, and so have no say whatsoever. When I think about it that way I see these photographs as what they represent of me, what they say about my personality and how I view other people, and relationships in general. The half-wayness. Or I dunno, maybe I'm reading too much of a muchness into it, I'm tired and grumpy today.

I didn't consciously realise I had taken so many photographs of stranger's backs until about a year and a half ago when I started looking back through the photos I'd taken to that point - I was in search of a unifying theme to make up a series to apply to an exhibition proposal. I was a little surprised to see how many I had taken, especially without having been aware of it. Looking back now I wonder what effect that knowledge has had on me when taking these photos now. I think I actually started taking more of them, but now I had a frame of reference. I became able to recognise what it was I actually thought would make (to me) a good photograph, or at least a photograph that said something. I still wasn't, and am not, sure what exactly that is. My reasons are still at the subconscious level, and while they're there all I can do is guess.

I don't think there's anything sinister in it, or creepy. I can see where the thought comes from but my intentions, though vague, are definitely not malevolent. On a practical level taking photographs of people without them even being aware of my presence is a way to avoid any sort of confrontation. But that raises the question of why I feel the need to include people at all. Why, if I'm so shy or scared, do I just not bother at all and stick to scenes bereft of people? Landscapes, still lifes etcetera. The simple, and honest, answer is that landscapes bore me and still lifes seem like too much work. But in relation to what? Which just brings me back to the question, why this necessity to include people?
I do know that if I'm looking at a series of photographs in a book or on a blog or wherever I spend more time looking at those that feature people in some way. I'm pretty sure I've always felt that way. I think the reason I preferred looking at, and later taking myself, these photographs is because of the variability, of expression (literal and figurative), of size, shape, race, gender, whatever. It's like every photograph of a person is somehow more new than a photograph of the moon or a field or a river or a building or a spider's eye or a monument or a flower or a tree or a dead animal or a cloud or a gravestone.

I still do take a lot of these photos (most of the ones here are from the last year or so) but I do take plenty of people directly within their line of sight. It's not a case of doing it once and then being able to do it always; I find that more than any other type of photograph this is the most dependent on my own mood. I generally have no problem asking someone for their photograph (again, depending on my own mood) but I find I don't do this very often, unless there's a specific reason. There's something about the person looking at the lens that lacks mystery. Maybe I just can't take those photographs.