Man alive, I just love this one! My imitations will know no limits. When I scanned this yesterday, I paused for a moment and wondered who might have taken it. Maybe William Klein. Maybe Fred Herzog. And just maybe Leiter, too. All of them working magic in the 1950s. And there was Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. And I can't leave out Mark Cohen or Garry Winogrand.
Those have been and will now again be my guiding lights.
Actually shot on black and white film, too, just like olden times.
Some photography orients the viewer. Ansel Adam's images, for instance. He puts you in a place. Vacation pictures and wedding photographers, by and large, do.
This one, though, is more disorienting. I like it. It seems to me a half-remembered dream. I couldn't wait to show it. It makes my knees weak. It's been awhile since I've been this excited to shoot pictures again.
But photography is becoming increasingly illegal. Peepers and creepers are popping up everywhere. Glasses with cameras are becoming illegal in Europe. God warned us about making graven images, but we didn't listen. Islam knows how to deal with infidels. They've been killing photographers in some Islamic states. They are a deeply religious people.
As-salamu alaykum.
Photography, as art, is heretical, I think. It is, as C..C. says of all art, transgressive. By that, of course, I mean that it asks you to look beyond the boundaries of what you are used to and what you believe in. The rest is just decorative.
But don't misunderstand me--I like the decorative, too.
Sometimes.
I'm just pulling your leg a bit, though. I don't believe in ART. But I do believe there are artists.
Me? I just want to please and delight and, if I can, make you laugh.
"You just like to piss people off, don't you?"
That is what one of my favorite grad professors said to me one day as we were riding in an elevator together. It rather shocked me, but I am pretty quick sometimes.
"No, sir. I just want to shake them out of their complacency."
And that, my friends, was the conversation verbatim.
In meetings, when I disagreed with someone, I'd agree with them to the absurd extreme. I'd run that logic out to its furthest distance just to watch it crumble. Usually, the room got uncomfortably quiet, but afterwards, people would tell me, "I'm always glad when you are in these meetings. You say what everyone else is thinking."
It started in grade school where I thought I was the class lawyer.
"You can't do that to Bobby. That's not fair."
Oddly enough, I never got a paddling or detention in my whole educational career. Isn't that something? I never got fired, either.
But, I think, if I had gone along more, I could have done better. I had a knack for sometimes shooting myself in the foot.
"How's that working for you? You sure showed them, didn't you?"People still like to say things like that to me now. They like that I'm nobody. That's what Dean Martin told me. He said, "You're nobody 'til somebody loves you. You're nobody 'til somebody cares."
My mountain buddy brought it up the other day when he visited. He remembers a line I used.
"You're right. You win. Now get out of my house."
"Look how that worked out!"
Kick a fellow when he's down, I said. Nobody loves me. Nobody cares.
"You need to quit being so picky. You need a partner."
That one came from my beautician last week.
When I left the cafe yesterday, though, the counter lady ran out after me to tell me goodbye. Huh. That was a big surprise.
I went home and shaved. Holy shit, that was a big mistake. There is nothing now but my old wrinkled vestige of a face.
"Look away! I'm hideous!"
I think I need a vacation badly.
I'm still shooting film, and I think I got the scanner working again. I won't know for sure until I run it through its paces for a bit. Won't be doing that today, though. I have to take mother across town to the oral surgeon for a 1:30 appointment. Fucks my day up royally. I used to spend my nights listening to music and working on images so long ago now. Now I watch t.v. Those were better times.
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