Armed with a camera and thirty or so frames of film, the intrepid photographer is faced with infinite possibilities. And once you've graduated from wanting to take focused in pictures of parking meters and mail boxes you might be asking yourself, much like I did after taking the film cameras out of their bag after three years of rest, what will constitute your limited frames. Relative to technical limitations your options are limitless. Much like words on a page and notes in a composition, the starting point is a pretty vast horizon. the matter, as in most cases, gets more complicated as you try and build up a theme, or an idea, or to portray a desire. That's when it really gets down to the composition. If you don't get an idea about what you're trying to scrape up from the world around you, then you're just a prick holding a camera in a park. And that pressure, if you're me, mounts fairly rapidly. You might bring the camera up to your eye, pull the focus, evaluate. Put the camera down, keep walking. Try and try again. The limitations of film as a medium, to belabor a cliché, define how one creates that relationship to the work. The scarcity of function in using an old, in all reality half broken, piece of equipment, creates the opportunity for a kind of self reflection that the infinitude of digital photography doesn't. The facsimile, the realm of the camera, has penetrated every aspect of our lives (I feel like I'm just piling clichés on top of clichés) at a speed and velocity that creates a kind a world of the image unto itself. Out perceptions are defined more by the mediated image that perhaps they are by our capacity to ingest the material world around us. If a photographer sets out to, instead of consume, create images, photos, art then they have to come out of a usual frame of mind (forgive the pun). In this pursuit, the film camera, I believe, is well suited to the task of aiding the artist who wishes to look with intention. After you have taken the camera up to your eye, and lowered it, and again raised and lowered it, you might find that first thing that feels worth the price of the exposure. Maybe a Pidgeon. A boat on a river. Maybe someone quite interesting. Will you take a picture of them? Will you ask? It's perfectly legal to take a photo of someone in public without asking. Maybe that's not something you're considering. Depending on what kind of image your trying to make you're going to have to interact with people, express something of yourself and your relationship to other people in the pursuit of the work. You're going to have to figure this out, as your walking around with your camera. When I got into the groove I found myself shooting people from behind, positioning myself as a kind of peripheral figure, taking a shot of a river with some people in one corner or another. taking pictures of a beautiful water feature that has children playing in it, so you get a wide frame, you don't take a picture of anyone specifically. And that postured just continued as I wandered Coolidge park on the North Shore of the Tennessee river. Getting a couple in the bottom right corner of the frame. I was behind a large masonry planter, they were on the other side, cuddled up, arm over shoulder. They were obscured by swaying plants. I was framing up a bridge, there are three wonderful bridges that span the Tennessee river near Coolidge park. I still don't know what that picture will look like. If it'll convey anything like an emotion, or an idea... or maybe they're just pictures, moments frozen in a miraculous chemical reaction. Perhaps that is simply what you pull from the world with your camera. But I don't fear intention, or the rigor it brings.
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