Archive for February 4th, 2010
Everyone’s gone to the movies…
My dream had me pushing carts around a hotel basement somewhere and there was a vague menace.
Low ceilings, patterned carpet.
These twenty sentence things are not repackaged tweets; rather they are all new original content generated out of a crushing sense of inertia.
I’m a content provider?
The above photo was taken while I waited for people to get out of the way of another photo I wanted to take: a heavily bolted steel pillar in the middle of a Queens train station.
I had noticed the pillar’s knobby texture in contrast to the tiled surface of the passageway behind it and like so many other of my pictures I didn’t want something in it that would distract from showing that contrast.
Thus, I was in the position of wishing that the torrent of other people moving through the hallway on their evening commute would vanish, so that the purity of my aesthetic vision might be transmitted uncompromised.
I suppose I was feeling like Ayn Rand.
The moment of absence didn’t happen, at least not during the ten minutes or so I was waiting and snapping off pictures so as to ward off the notion that I was loitering, so I packed up my camera and moved on to my evening appointment.
In my pictures New York is mostly an unpopulated city.
It’s as if I appreciate their traces more than their presences: better a scrawl on a wall than the person sitting next to me on the subway.
There’s some exception if the person is cute, and my friends and family show up in front of my camera as well.
It’s a bad habit, to be wishing people away.
Pictures and recognition have been much on my mind lately.
Think of the world before 1800, and ask what percentage of the population had ever had a likeness made of their individual physiognomy.
Following on from that, how many ever had the slightest expectation of that happening to them?
And what is those percentages today?
In much of the world, I suspect that it has become hard to make it all the way through your life without having your picture taken, either by family or by someone else.
Is turning the camera away a recognition of the everyone’s compromised privacy?
Tags: daily photo, new york in black and white, photography, twenty sentences