M.O.

I blew everything off last night--gym, birthday party, a walk, whatever--and came home in a dead tired funk.  No one was around.  I opened up some files I have never looked at from my trip to New Mexico, the color ones I took with my Canon.  I just lazed through them with a drink.  They were someone else's pictures to me.  Was I there?  Was there a time when I could just walk around with a camera and take photographs?  I seemed to remember that it was going to be the start of something.  What?  I can't remember.  There is nothing to remember but work now, work to remember, work to look forward to.  Not just work, but the stress of work.

Later I lay in bed and read.  I have a subscription to Vanity Fair.  I haven't read one this year, I think.  I opened the latest edition and flipped the iPad pages.  Looking at the ads, I wondered why the photographer hadn't asked the model to move her hand up her head a bit or hadn't asked her to move her elbow forward two inches.  That is all the photographer has to do.  S/he doesn't style the shoot, doesn't command the concept, doesn't pick the model.  S/he poses the model, frames, places the lights.  Give me that job, I thought, if you want some kick ass images.

Or. . . I can give you these odd snaps of daily life, those moments when people become figures, stand-ins, cultural suggestions.

Or. . . I can give you nothing which seems to be a my modus operandi of late.  Or maybe just my M.O.  Period.

I want my next series to be called "Charlotte's Mother."  Let me know if you think it a good one.