A Million Pebbles

Writing has always come unnaturally for me. My mom likes to tell a story about me in kindergarten, when, selected by the class to write a thank you note to a group of fireman that had come to visit, I wrote “Thank you!” in moderately small font on the 2 foot by 4 foot piece of posterboard I was given. An early student of spacial relativity, I realized this looked sort of dumb, so went off to find a pair of sissors to trim away the remainder, and handed a postcard-sized piece of paper back to my teacher. “If you can’t raise the bridge, lower the river,” one of my college professors liked to say. So noted.

And yet, I do actually enjoy writing a fair bit. The words feel hard to come by most of the time though, and I look for coherence of thought in order to actually put pen to paper, or finger to computerboard. Writing in this way has a unique permanence to it, so the words need to mean something, I tell myself. Whether it’s those stakes - which, for as real as they are, seem quite low now that I look at them - or the omnipresent excuse of “but where can I find the time?”, writing is slow to come. Like desert monsoon, perhaps I just need a torrent of experienes to pile up in order for the reservoir to fill, for the dam to eventually break.

A lot has happened over the last year - trips, birthdays, some health scares that gently tap on your prefontal cortex and remind you of your mortality. Photography has continued to be an ever-evolving experiece, and the more I experience it, the more I refine my own relationship to what it means to make a photograph of something. Like writing, photographs increasingly need to mean something to me in order to heft the camera up to shoot. Or at least if I define something I produce as a photograph, it needs to meet that threshold. If pictures are worth a thousand words, a photograph often only needs to be worth a small handful. They just need to be the right ones.

I’ll be participating in a podcast in a few days, and in jotting down a few notes in advance of that, I’ve been able to further crystalize what my own definition of photography is. For as much as I love the automotive-centric work that I’ve produced over the last few years, it has an auora emptiness to it for me, which I realize is the byproduct of its distribution (Instagram) and its creation (adherence to the Rule of Thirds, leading lines, and whatever Photography 101 stuff the internet hammers into you). There is an arms-length sterillity to it. It is safe, and the algorithm gobbles it up as a result. It is a flawless entry level high dive - perfect, and perfectly mundane.

What resonnates to me more and more is the impefect, and by nature of that, realness and rawness. Photographs that are out of focus, that are off kilter and off center. That, at face value may seem to be of nothingness. But when looked at with deeper attention, they contain a thousand details of life lived and of hardship and struggle, and of places that may not be here someday, filled with people who assuredly won’t be. They are of a singular telephone pole in the midst of a dry riverbed, fissures ripping into the earth. They are of a gaveyard visited by no one in a town that is full of no one, two American flags standing sentry into a chainlink fence. They are of one’s self in a crappy motel room with peeling paint and a dirty showercurtain. The are of a million pebbles, if you are patient enough to look for them.

A Question of Color