May Day Monologue

Just a quick update:

Actually assisted on a shoot today, with my old boss, Mark Ostow. I'm not saying that I don't love my job right now, because believe me, I'm thankful everyday that I can be a photographer and be getting by, but today reminded me of why I truly, TRULY ever considered going into photography professionally.

I think I have been a photographer my whole life. Long before I ever picked up a camera. (And yes, I stole that from Sabrina). I have obsessively documented my life as it happened, since I was small, in the form of journals, letters, memorabilia, and, of course, photographs. So in some ways, I think, I was always meant to do this job.

However, I've always been something of a self-centered (or maybe, more appropriately, self-centric?) person. I've lived my life trying to figure out who I am, what I really believe, how I work, what makes me tick. But a life like that is lost the moment it ends, because, unless you were truly a person of some significant historical value, who will remember you? Cynical, yes, but true, is it not? Therefore, all this self-analyzing and collecting (or hoarding) and documenting becomes turns to dust when I'm gone.

Photography, for me, became a way of wriggling myself into other people's lives. Portraiture, by nature, is interactive - you cannot help but affect the subject in some way, and vice versa. Maybe this is something I've rationalized retrospectively (after all, hindsight is 20/20), but I believe all the projects I've endeavored on has, in a way, been a means of making people a part of my life permanently, to get into their personal histories, perhaps as a result of being a person who doesn't tend to maintain long-term friendships very well. Photographs as proof of momemts and memories.

This was still about me. However, when I started working for Mark years ago, I think that was the first time in my life I truly felt a part of something bigger than myself. We were constantly running around photographing people for magazines, and naturally, we went to each shoot prepared with background information on each subject, why they're being featured, etc.

However, far beyond that, the manner in which Mark interacts with people simply makes them open up, and we came away from each shoot knowing much more than I suspect the magazines ever divulged or even cared to think about. In order to capture what she considered their "true" selves, photographer Diane Arbus would torture her subjects - enduring them to sit through hours of painful, boring sessions or literally shoving her camera in their faces. Take the torturing aspect out of that (or maybe not - I feel people often feel enduring a photo session some sort of tortue) and thats essencially what we endevoured to find.

Often, far more fascinating even than what they became famed for, were the minute, mundane details of their lives which they have become so routinized to - things everybody does, but everone experiences so differently. Family stories, plights, meals... and to watch each person's face change, the manner in which they would emote, as they explained these mundane happenings - that is what I became fixated on, that I wanted to capture and convey to the rest of the world. I've never loved staged photography - never really thought anything you could paint should be taken in film instead. Photography as a means of capturing the world as it happens - the world and all of these people in it.

So maybe it still is about me. Maybe I want to inextricably tie myself to the world by hoarding other people's stories, remembering what might be forgotten about them if they, like myself, are doomed to be historically insignficant. And maybe, if I can remember them, and have other people remember them, then I myself won't get lost in the web.

Adendum, because my lovely manager just berated me for implying that children are not people. I do take joy in my job now for some of the same reasons. I went through a mini-crisis about year ago because I began to think that what I was doing was lost in the mother's looking for inachievable perfection in their children - a fact that bothered me all the more, being the type of person that relishes in other peoples chaos and flaws. I lost the love of what I was doing in my generalization of the achetypal "Mom" that comes to studio, as well as the routine of the job - a sort of they're-not-really-interesting-they're-just-a-paycheck type deal. I have, however, in the past months, come to listen more carefully, pay more attention, and have found a new love for my work with children and families - maybe that's why my sales got better :) Just kidding.

So the following photos don't REALLY have anything to do with any of that - this is just bonus, since it is a photoblog.

And, hey, its children. Some beautiful children at that, *wink*wink* to the lovely Miss Crystal.

Not really a quick update. I'm exhausted and I guess I got a little carried away - so I'm not sure any of that even made sense! Haha.

6:30am wake up call for tomorrow's shoot, so for now, I bid you all, adieu.