...but I tried...

Happy birthday! This video better not leave this blog! =P

Mask

The mask is my own face--my skin, my color, my countenance. It is me, hidden, but on the outside. My humanity which stands between my self and your mask, it seems to protect and cover and I feel as though I can be still, abiding behind, but in reality it is still skin--still exposed. My body is my mask, because it stands as a mediator between my soul and the world outside.

Though I can't see my mask fitting perfectly into any pre- or post-modern category, if I had to choose one I would place it as a sort of simulacra, because the external skin acts as what Baudrillard would call a "perceived reality" unable to contain or accurately depict the true reality of the soul behind the skin. What I'm trying to portray here is the limited nature of an image; that the soul penetrates so much deeper than any sort of simulacra a frame may contain. It's like the difference between two and three dimensions; a person is infinitely deeper than their image. Reality stands behind the frame, though so often I allow my mind to get wrapped up in the flatness of the image on top. If there's one thing I learned through this project, it's to never allow myself to be content with just knowing someone's face-skin and not the reality underneath.

Imagination Landscape

So when I was little, I used to hold myself in a back bend on the floor of my living room; imagined the ceiling and the floor were reversed, and I could wander the furniture-free floors, whitewashed and invisible. I miss that sense of escape and detachment which results from losing time in imagination, which is what I'm trying to capture here.

A Landscape

My landscape photo is one of mourning detachment from the earth—“playing inside on a rainy day”. I wanted to achieve a sort of longing to return outside where it is light, and everything is bigger. If I had to name it, I think I would call it, “Natural Things Belong in Nature.” My goal is that the viewer looks up with the detached and fallen leaves to find home not in a house, but outside.

Portraits

There is, and always will be a disconnect between the skin and the soul; the nature of perception is that it reveals a very limited impression. I see at best in small vignettes.

The Rear Window example is interesting in thinking about the plot of each individual. I talked with a friend who is very much involved in theatre the other day who admitted that she feels as though she runs her life like a play, planning the scenes of the day the night before, putting on a sort of “stage” makeup in the morning, and acting out her ideal character. I found this profound and interesting in thinking about our desire to determine our own stories and write the screenplay for our lives; the problem with this is that we end up with millions of scripts and no reality, and no ability to really relate to anyone. Lisa has to give up her own plot to her life in order to relate to Jeffries, and she just becomes a character in his story.

My ideal portrait is simply that—Aphrodite, the classical “eternal feminine” and representation of the ideals of love, beauty, and pleasure. I wanted to communicate the idea of aspiring to the ideal—always flying upward towards that perfection with imaginary, illusionary wings, when in reality aspiration is exhausting. When Derek and I were taking our pictures, we were rushed to finish up our real portraits, so my real portrait is actually really honest. I didn’t feel like I was posing, and I didn’t try to make any unnatural expression. I was tired, as you can see, and ready to be done. While the ideal portrait involved falsely modeling and positioning and repositioning so that the projection was just right, in my real portrait I honestly just sat in a chair and stared at the protrusive camera.

I don’t think you can ever have a “real” portrait, however; an image can be at best the skin to a reality beneath—a small vision and vignette sitting on top of true knowledge of a person. May I learn to know people in a deeper way than projections, theatre scripts, and images.

The Business Cycle

Landscape of my Home

So I wanted to try some extended exposures to experiment with some different settings, so a thought a good place to start would be the city at night. Here's some shots of my hometown Washington from some roofs.