Eye of the Beast, detail.
… There’s an antidote for this virtual reality of sitting in a squeaky chair staring at the flat screen pushing the mouse around. It’s called getting out. Walking down the street and watching objects pass by in true 3D. Grabbing an unidentifiable object off the ground and feeling it’s weight, texture and temperature. Chopping wood. Climbing trees. Catching a baseball. Hitting it back. Going out, watching actual people, speaking to them with air as conduit, and hearing music emanate from body to instrument to ear.
This got me thinking about when I used to thread my film, squeegee my negatives and ferrocyanide my prints. What ever happened to pulling a Polaroid, finding the notch and calculating bellows extension? I miss spotting a print, putting the loupe down on a transparency and being able to hit the inside of my camera with canned air.
I really felt alive when I created my pinhole camera self-portrait series back in 1996. It was a response to my father’s passing, and I used the ultra-slow pinhole process to meditate on life and photography. continued …
