Uncertainty

I work on the pics.  I keep trying to find a process that I like, one that I can do consistently.  Sometimes, I think I have found one, then I look back at a previous version and think I've gone too far.  And then I'll start over again.  I'll end up with several versions of the photo, then I wonder if the image was worth the industry.  Then I begin to slide into self-doubt and don't want to make photos anymore.  

Other times, I'll think I've nailed it. . . for a bit.  I've sent out some wrestling pics to the promoter and some derby pics to the organizers.  

Crickets.  

They love their standard out of the camera reality looking pictures, I guess.  That's what I tell myself.  

"Not everyone wants. . . ."

"What are you going to do with the photos?" my mother asks me.  Indeed.  

"It's supposed to be good for people to have a creative outlet.  I read that in the AARP Bulletin."

That seemed to satisfy her.  

When I had the studio, the photos were as much about the person I was photographing as anything else.  We talked a lot.  I was trying to break through some psychological walls.  Talking was fun.  It was a revelation.  

When I make photos on the street, it is another thing.  I'm trying to see the world around me and what goes on.  I'm trying to tell a contemporary story for other times.  

During Covid, I just took photos of inanimate objects.  Houses and buildings representing the lives they housed.  Mansions and shacks, the exteriors of businesses.  And then there was the peripherals, the paraphernalia of life.  Those photos were cold, though, and perhaps it is with a sense of the dread of that time that I look back on them and feel a void.  

This stuff I'm trying now, this walk into offbeat happenings. . . what am I doing?  If I am going to continue, I have to find the spine connecting it all.  Still, I'm learning a lot about the sorts of photography I'd never done before.  

Maybe it's the crickets that set me back the most.  I can send them the straighter versions of things, the least processed photographs.  I can make those in a Texas second.  I'll keep the other stuff for myself.  

"What are you going to do with the photographs?" becomes "Why do you make those photographs?"

That one is easier.  I'm a peeper.  I like to look and then hold onto the thing.  

"Creepy."

Yea.  

It's easier not to argue.  

"Every picture tells a story, don't it?"

"Yea. . . about YOU!"

That's the scariest part.  Every photo tells you more about the photographer than the things in the frame.  Think of all the selfies, the photos people take of their husbands, wives, and children.  I'm fascinated by them all.  

So, I spent yesterday trying to work in color, but I'm thinking the photos are better off monochromatic.  Even with the manipulated colors, they look too "normal."  I don't know.  I'm still working.  You are getting to see the flow.  You are seeing a lot of pictures of which I hope to have a few "keepers."  I'd really like to please these people, though.  I would like to go back.  I don't want it to be a one and done.  

Yes. . . I'm probably going in the wrong direction with the color, though I think they are subtly different.  Maybe, though, the black and white stands out more and is a bit more dark and noir-ish.  

I keep thinking that I really need an assistant.  I have ideas that would require one.  I can't do everything by myself.  Plus, it would be nice to have a second voice.  As irritating as a relationship can be, it's nice to have two brains instead of one when the shit comes down.  

"I don't know. . . let's go through the options."

Consensus.  

If you are going to make things for public consumption, though, you'd better have a pretty thick skin.  I mean, Modigliani died broke and sick in a cold water flat in the winter with all those paintings nobody was buying.  His most beautiful wife, though, held him in her arms while he died.  There was, at least, someone who believed in him.  

Criminy, she looks just like his paintings!

"The day after Modigliani's death, Hébuterne was taken to her parents' home. There, inconsolable, she threw herself out of a fifth-floor window, killing herself and her unborn child."