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JAN 8, 2012
POST YULE PYRE
Dragged my cold self down to Sloat and Vincente to shoot Christmas Tree bonfires.
I’d been working up a new statement earlier in the day.. Nice to reexamine new words with new images.

dunes

crowd

more Rothko waves

watchers

fires out
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DEC 22, 2011
RESCUE
Thinking about loneliness and home(s).. I found some now-relevant images from past years.

Ocean Beach

Emily

Aaron

Thanksgiving in Warwick, 2008

Imprints, Summer
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DEC 13, 2011
THANKSGIVING IN NY

post-Thanksgiving fire

Before going home for break, I’d been incredibly blocked, not really photographing at all. I spent a lot of time thinking about how much evidence I do or do not include in pictures.. wondering how to more clearly explain what I feel, either with figures, or even text.
In Brooklyn, I had a really fantastic conversation with Charlotte and Erik about narrative and photography (among other things). Sometimes if you go too long between discussions with art friends, you forget how legitimate your specific viewpoints and interests are. It was good to reinvest myself in this..

I am trying to nail down one comparison in particular. I am a person with strong feelings towards my home(s) and specific places. I need fairly constant comfort from these things. When I’m in these places – Warwick, my hometown, or San Francisco, often with the people I love most dearly – I feel the most alienated. I’m interested in continuing to picture this, and communicating that through more simplified composition, mood and feeling.

Kate

Kate

wolves, Museum of Natural History

Last night in Warwick

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NOV 13, 2011
OTHER HOMES/ENDINGS
Whenever I sequence any edit or series, I always have strong feelings about the narrative order each photograph has. Regardless of what images they might be paired with, to me they all have a very specific timing, and place in the plot. Looking back after this year, it seems so much that the images I chose are ending types of photographs.

camp

Black Rock mtns.
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AUG 9, 2011
JULY IN BKLYN
In any city, Brooklyn or SF, if I stay unremoved for an extended amount of time, I get completely caught up.
The rat race, to-do list, whats-the-most-efficient-way-for-me-to-get-from-home-to-here mindset is so hard to escape, that without some actual landscape space, or way to physically lift out of it, I would undoubtedly go mad. Much in the way that Bernal Heights brings me back to sanity, in NY it was always the Museum of Natural History. Suggested admission on a Sunday, I could sit down in the Hall of Ocean Life until everything leveled out.

On my trip home in July, I finally, finally got my whale shot.

in the Hall of Ocean Life

There was also a thunderstorm!

It’s pretty glaringly obvious to me how little my work is involving people these days. All the images I like show no faces, and people end up as a component of their surroundings – or not there at all. Maybe that’s where my mind was at.

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JUN 21, 2011
PHOTO GROCERIES
Portraits from the end of May.

in Bernal

Productivity guilt is ever-present, in my everyday life, and my photography life as well. It’s taken some time to, slowly, outgrow my undergrad all-nighter training. Having the space and time to make art requires some habit-forming and conscious effort in how I’ll use all that energy. Mostly, I feel like the amounts I shoot are never enough, and there’s a constant backlog of the art I “should” have already made.

The other night I took a walk up Bernal with Anna, and had one of my first really heartening shooting bouts in a while. It made me think of this: Sometimes my productivity guilt feels like errant energy to go out and shoot something. Go out right now, and make an important picture! If I make an effort to shoot, in that mood and time, it’s like those nights, having not bought groceries in at least 3 weeks, when there isn’t any food to cook a decent dinner from. It’s frustrating, and hardly relates at all to my skill, time, willingness, etc.

On our walk the other night, I had a great bunch “ingredients” (in my food metaphor) to work from. Anna taking a walk that’s been her daily San Francisco habit, heading off to Greece and Spain and France for a month, checking out The Nothing rolling in new on another night, and being in a place I truly love.

I’m really happy with what came out.

little Anna in the big world

side trail