samedi 1 octobre 2005

I am the Sun... You are the Moon Solar Eclipse A number of times recently I've been asked why I'm throwing out most of my work. The short answer is that I'm looking for something new. I don't know what it is... it don't think it's what I've done to date. I find it too easy to choose a single image, or make a kaleidoscopic matrix of a few colourful pictures... but then what? It doesn't thrill me any more... it doesn't earn me a living any more... in effect by publishing everything on the internet I give it all away. A few people like to use my images as links to articles or events they are writing about and after asking, credit me accordingly with a link back to here... but more take and use images without thinking for a moment of the creative ownership of such. So be it... my pleasure is that I was there, at the time, and even if I hadn't recorded the image on film I would have experienced it. I don't need the tangible photographic image to remember what I saw... my memory, fairly useless though it might be for more important things, has that memory. I know what I saw and did before and after the images one sees here... that's my reward... the experience. I'm also slightly bemused at the lengths people go to to preserve their work... some years ago a photographer wag said, "Soon the world will be full of archivally produced photographs." It's almost true... and of what? Why the obsession with mostly nondescript photographs that retain their manipulated grey-scale tones for 100 years? And who cares a jot? I'm almost halfway through throwing away around a quarter of a million negatives, and that's not counting 17,000 transparencies which were dumped last week, pierced with a knife... at times my fingers bled, but not my resolve. This may be the last blog entry I make... my renewal is due in a few days on October 6th and I'm not sure I'll carry on. I've been surprised by the number of page hits in the past year... but what does it mean? I got hooked on the numbers at one point, like a train spotter. But a couple of weeks ago I met a wonderful woman who talks at length about life and many other things. During our second or third rendezvous one simple word particularly struck a chord, which we now laugh about... "labels." And it's true... most of us in the consumable's society are obsessed, by and large, with labels, names, brands, styles. When someone asks me what cameras I use I don't say, "35 mm," I say, "Nikon and Leica." But worse, I use labels for the labels... Nikon F2 Plain Prism (the "plain prism" identifying me as not needing or caring to use an exposure meter)... and Leica M3 S/S (the "S/S" standing for "single stroke" rewind... as if it made any difference to me or the listener / reader or the viewer of an image taken using one.) Curiosity piqued I took a look at a Nikon catalogue and couldn't understand the coded initials next to some of their recent lenses... of a marque I've used for over thirty years. As Thom Harrop says on his "lens acronyms" page... That New AF-S ED-IF G VR PC DC DX Nikkor is a What? Well, things are changing in my life and I'll feel better for it one day... and when I've purged all the labels out of my system and self I'll start to find clarity in something again... BTW : The above image was made with a... forget it, it's of no importance. For those interested in eclipses it was of the total solar eclipse seen over south-west Britain at 10:00 am on August 11th 1999 and on a track across the English Channel, over Northern France, Southern Germany then over Romania, Bulgaria, the Black Sea, central Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, central India and ending at sunset over the Bay of Bengal. The next big event will be an annular eclipse in two days time, October 3rd, seen by Europeans over Portugal and Spain. Enjoy it if you can get there... camera or no camera. 10:10:41 PM    comment []