Now headed for South Dakota, where Gus, and I will set up legal residence. New York is history for me. It will be a slightly strange feeling to officially become a citizen of a state with no coastline…
I feel like I’ve made another change in my… creative life I suppose. I’ve long been a serious photographer (since the late 1980s) but the art/craft has always been secondary to writing, and surfing, for that matter. Now it’s at the top of the list.
There is something about the simplicity… the parsimony… and especially the… spontaneity, by which I mean the possibility of creating something meaningful with a simple… interpretive… press of a button, .i.e., noticing and at the same time creating a metaphorical representation already there in the environment, yet not seen by others…
…as I’ve pointed out before, the ability to see (and then point out) meaning, especially when it involves deceits, grand or otherwise, where others do not, is a talent that has not faded, as my surfing and writing have… anyway, this is what appeals to me about photography at this point in my sorry ass life.
Addendum: Theoretically a chimpanzee could take a great photograph, if accidentally. This is why a photographer’s talent is never based on a single image, but rather on his/her body of work. That and which images the photographer choses to show publicly. The latter (call it interpretive taste) is for some reason never brought up by critics. (Another thing I’ve ‘noticed’.)
I recall that in that insufferable movie version of the insufferable book, The Bridges of Madison County, the Clint Eastwood character claims that he was recruited as a National Geographic photog based on a single, ‘brilliant’ image he had created, a notion that had me rolling with hilarity. As I say, a chimp could create one brilliant image. A body of work, not so much. For National Geo to hire someone based on one photograph would be like Random House giving a writer a multi-book deal based on one sentence.
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(A week and a half later) I’ve concocted another slide show, which I will embed below, and it reminds me of what photography really means, especially as a body of work. It defines your travels, where you’ve been, what you saw, and whether you’ve conducted yourself with… panache… in doing so.
Period. A photographer tries to tell you about the emotion or other sort of meaning in his/her imagery, tell him/her to fuck off.
So here’s a photo record of the past ten or so days, where I’ve been and so forth.
Before I hang it up for this post, listen to this: My 5 terabyte external hard drive, upon which I back up everything… I mean EVERYTHING… (By the way, suddenly when I try to italicize anything, a fucking big window comes down telling me to sign in to an email account. More cyber bullshit… PLUS, I can’t embed any photos in the text.)
I’d bought Data Recovery insurance from The Seagate Corporation on the drive so I contacted them about saving my data. They told me it would take a month at least. Why so long? I demanded.
‘Because of the three week quarantine,’ the German accented guy tells me.
‘Quarantine? What quarantine?’ I wanted to know.
‘The wirus,’ he says.
What the fuck is a wirus, I’m wondering. Some sort of cyber speak for… Wait a minute. Does he mean the VI-rus? the fucking COVID vi-rus? (I STILL CAN’T ITALICIZE.)
Yep, that’s it.
Get this: The Seagate Corporation is going to put my hard drive in QUARANTINE for three weeks before anyone TOUCHES it.So they don’t get sick and die.
Another example, a beaut, of the insanity we are living under. (This sentence likewise needs italicization.)
Okay, I hope you enjoy the slide show, which defines where I’ve been lately, what I saw, and a little bit about how I conducted myself in doing so…
Allan
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