Counting on chaos is a brand of control.

For the last year, a significant amount of the work I've shot has been multiple exposures.

Specifically I am referring to film shot in single exposure frames -- then rewound, reloaded and shot again.

I don't keep journals or notes or vague memories of what photographs reside on each roll.

When I shoot portraits of someone I always warn them: you will be overlapped with something, but I don't know what it is -- and there is the possibility that this image I am making now will never be seen because of the chaos of light/dark balancing or my own metering fault (see: this).

Often I don't share them online because you have to choose a single orientation that often excludes/prevents seeing anything in the image outside the chosen orientation. So instead of sharing here, I show them to the person/people in them or whomever happens to be sitting next to me when I'm in the mood to look at my own work (usually in search of a specific photograph). And that's about it.

Maybe I'll figure out how to do it here. But until then, the most recent example, below:

Shot on Friday with Brittany at her house in the gorgeous afternoon window light of her bedroom,

&

shot on Saturday with Bashfulleigh in my kitchen as I dyed my hair while naked and almost made us late for class.

Things to do on an airplane: make a list of all the images you would like to peruse on the return home.

Two double-exposed photographs of Bashfulleigh -- 

one exposure made while we were still in the airport (parking lot),

one exposure made after she bathed in my tub the next morning.

Before this moment, I did not give either of these photos any more than a cursory look.

In part because I like saving something of Bashfulleigh to return to, visually, when I miss her.

With any luck (and a lot of work on both of our parts), I may not have to miss her for long.

Which is why, tonight, I opened this forgotten roll of film.

This happens with me. I'm really good (too good!) at waiting... 

until I am not.

On the Fugitive.

The inevitable has happened. I'm surprised how long it took... but not at all surprised that it happened while on vacation(ish).

After shooting one roll of film three times through -- in the subway, in the trees, in the mirror, off the roof, etc. --
I direly overexposed each time and did all but expunge every detail from every negative.

To be fair, these were shot on a fully manual camera that I had only used two other times.
To be fairer, I did pretty well on those other two rolls.
To be fairest, I shoot on fully manual cameras that are brand new to me quite often and have never purged the information.

So, this is one hundred percent my false reading/guessing of the light and the context of light.

It's probably not a coincidence that most of what I shot on this roll is of Eli.
Eli, of whom I shot so many exquisite photos last August.
Eli who, while I was shooting this invisible roll, gave me such enormous compliments about our last time working together.

Humbling? Uh, yeah. Fuck yeah.

*

And yet, I know myself better than this. You know me better than this too.

Of all the photographs I made in New York, why am I sharing with you here
the ones that did not work, the ones that escape(d) me and confound(ed) me?

Not because I'm a masochist (though I am), not because I find value in advertising failure (though I do).
 

I don't often look back over what I've shared, but in light of recent events, I've had to go through my entire blog in search of elusive images of a specific face/name/likeness that I was forced to remove.

Apparently, what often interested me to share was what I lost. At the will and cause of my own hands.
This is no different from life: there are enough pop songs written about not knowing what you've got until it's gone.

But it is a decadent luxury to love your own mistakes, to not call them mistakes at all.
It's not one that is affordable in many situations.

Writing frankly, I find it easier to share mediocre photos here with you because I don't have to apologize for them.
I don't have to title them, tell you what size they are, offer them for sale or alternative forms of value.
I can talk over them. I can give you my voice and my dialogue in them.
A finished, polished photo that gave me what I wanted has no room for air, much less conversation.

I make work, occasionally, that I like. Sometimes that feeling lasts more than a day or two, though often not.
But the half-crappy images -- I love them forever. It is the only quality that is satisfying but not elusive.

(Half a self-portrait with half a painted heart.)

When I shoot photos of people, especially of strangers, I often ask them to shoot a photo of me on my camera.
This isn't something I plan. I generally forget to ask until I'm looking through the film and find something missing.

Partially, it's more fun for me to encourage others to shoot photos than to shoot photos myself.
Partially it's because people who aren't expecting to shoot an image tend to make fantastic, spontaneous photographs.
Partially (hello, honesty), I kinda love having my photo taken in an action-oriented, non-modeling way.

While shooting, I tend to feel a supreme joy -- and to be able to express it.

It's not quite manic, but it's a perfect example of most positive, active self:

I talk, I laugh, I run, I jump, I share stories and objects, I get dirty, I wind up on the ground in odd positions, 

I read poems out loud, I wake up sore the next morning, I sing, I change clothes, I smile so much my jaw hurts.

Mostly, having people take these photos is a self-documentation of happiness, my happiness, in movement, as seen through them.

*

I had never met Erica before she showed up at my temporary(ish) apartment. While she was naked on the roof looking at me and the beautiful sky, I set my camera settings, turned on the flash and passed it to her. Then asked her to take a photo of me. 

photo taken on my camera by Erica Jay

Look at this gem! It's such a gift to have such wonderful photos of yourself, being yourself, being grateful, simply being.

(the affect is merely shadow)

You may not be amused/surprised that I'm sad my black eye is all but disappeared.

I've fallen in love with how differently strangers treat me when they talk to my eye and not my person.

People know this for many sorts of reasons, and they're not always positive.

But this particular change in my face --
MY EYE --
has freed me, turned me into object that has turned me into hyper-subject,
unable and uninterested in resisting scrutiny, knowing that is unpinpointable -- which is why it is fun to hunt.

This is not strictly on the shoulders of Others; I'm tickled at how differently I look at myself!
How much looking in the mirror has varied this week and a half.

It's not sheer coincidence that it has taken a physical (and painful, intimate) endeavor with my self to return to sharing here with any regularity. I'm slowly gathering energy to re-introduce myself to this format -- documenting change is such an easy reason to move your 'publish now'-finger.

Returning to Houston on Sunday means moving toward a quieter self with much less distraction, both good and bad.

I'm dreaming (scheming) ways to fill (feel) my days (daze).
I am bringing home a self with a perpetual (if invisible) black eye.

Compass-less, Brid(g)e-Black & Pink Glass

These photos sum up (fairly well, embarrassingly) what I've done since being in New York:

adding layers to a horizon I feared was completed because it had grown quiet,

employing the full metaphor of a bridge in the exploration of my (somewhat self) abuse,

finding (and making) pretty messes against the bottomless sky.

Self-portrait with not-my-camera, black-eye and two unknown cityscapes.

How many photos will I share before I wonder, again, if the sharing is finished for now?

It feels like Just One. But perhaps that's optimism.

But I don't think so. And that's optimism.

Feels Way Too Good.

On reorientation after (minor, heartbreaking, plausible, joy-inducing, sublime) destruction.

-->

What, then, occupies space? A body – not bodies in general, nor corporeality, but a specific body, a body capable of indicating direction by a gesture, of defining rotation by turning round, of demarcating and orienting space.

- Henri Lefebvre summarizing Leibniz, from The Production of Space

landscape as performance art

performance art as landscape

-->

*

-->

I've been terrified to post lately.

But as I was told today: 

reason gives imagination wings AFTER you jump off the cliff.

And when the spotlight shined upon us from above, whole bodies disappeared.

Weren't we better off for the loss?

*

April 2013

Where I was when you told me where you were.

I sat across from this tree and read a relatively short email. 

Took me an hour to write one word in response.

Trauma teaches you how to see,

teaches you to look up from what's entrapped you 

(which is generally your own self)

and see something but your own pride.

I have taken more photos in the last two days than I have in a long time.

A few of me, none of another person, way too many of the few blocks around which I live (and love).

Talk about the definition of relief.

Invisibility turns into movement turns into visibility.

There are days when I do feel 17ft 10 inches.

Today is not one of those days.

Good news is, I've never loved my closest friends more.

How valuable we are who can share together, verbally, psychically, emotionally, visually.

Remove one of those abilities and look -- three more!

*

I take it back. Today (right now!) I can, should, will, do feel tall. 

Tall with what I have instead of small with what I do not.

On constructing truths to dispel the sensation of fiction...

*

 

[T]here can be historical depth to the notion of truth -- 

not the depth of unearthing a coherent and unitary past, 

but the depth of the past's reverberation with the present.

- Linda Williams, 'Mirrors Without Memories'

The first two photographs I shot after watching (fully, for the first time) Chris Marker's 'Sans Soleil'

(taken twelve hours apart, less than two weeks ago)

*

They are exactly the same, save for content. Rather, I am exactly the same in them.
 
Centering my inflamed, aflame subject in same center of the frame, its internal light exploding from within.

Wonder if that speaks more to what the film did to me or more of what I naturally looked for when watching the film.

On the girl in the purple dress surrounded by stuffed animals and sitting with her legs crossed at the knees.

And also on how she will not be mentioned past this sentence.

Instead, on the State Fair I visited tonight.

On how I photographed it endlessly a year ago, made many images that still quicken my heart (thank you, Chris Marker) 

on how tonight I had to force myself to take a single photograph.

On how the loss of desire doesn't mean loss at all but gain of something stronger

and on how sometimes we say that because it's overwhelming to think about desire as something loseable.

On how many chances you miss. To know things, to document, to remember, to look the other direction.

On looking the other direction.

On where you parked the car and how it had to do with architecture and an abstract diagonal,

my photo of an empty stadium built against a temporary shrine lit up like a fireworks stand on fire.

How we sit on different chairs. On how chairs face away or to the walls.

How tonight the handmade quilts hung across the I-beam over our heads, on how she noticed what was behind them.

On how I only thought about sleeping beneath them. On not sleeping beneath them.

On how the different things I imagined waged a battle; it was bloody; it disappeared, explained nothing as it dissolved.

I took a self-portrait under the quilt in my sister's spare bedroom. Where is it?

I read an email tonight that I will fight against answering.... 

Not on these things.

Gerhard Richter said:

You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing.

[...]

What interests me in general are things I don't understand. 

It's like that with every picture: I don't like the ones I understand. 

self-portrait with escape hatches (in the false shape of frames)

Lately I understand everything I make. How tiresome!

Now, how to make chaos without (psychic, creative, secretive) drama.

Fantasty life introduced to the real.
(Though, to be fair, that makes me sound like more fun than I actually am/have been.)

As my professor said yesterday,

"We return with a vengeance to the Sublime."

In case I haven't made this clear enough...

I'm pretty much rambling here.

I'm trying out ideas, writing words I often don't use in daily life, borrowing language from books I've read that are over my head.

I'm not an intellectual. I don't make foolproof theories or think I know best. I don't lead discussions or write books.

I don't believe in The Right Way or One Way.

Although I do believe that there are quality thinkers who believe (and can prove) the opposite.

(This is why I link to quotes / poems / videos / essays as often as I can; 

you can't trust me beyond my pointing finger to the source.)

Here, on this blog, I think of myself as a mediocre explorer of my own creative and emotional life.

And also, not here on this blog.

In case I have lead you astray, I should not be relied upon as a beacon of anything but personal curiosity.

Mostly, I like to write words here to cause my shutter finger a wave of mania.

Language moves in me like an electrical cord directly connected to the use of my camera.

I've found what works for me.

I figure people with more dedication and discipline are tearing me apart.

I've figured that, and every once in a while I know it to be true.

I'm just learning. I'm fucking up a lot. I have regrets about things I've shared with you.

More often, I have regrets about things I didn't share.

I hope to find guides -- accidental ones and purposeful ones.

Like lights on in windows downtown. Or lights over lights on in windows downtown.

Anti-Fortress(ing)

Tonight was the opposite of these photos.

Which is why I share them now, because they make me feel like it's not hard to be doted upon or vulnerable.

These photos remind me that it often happens that, through circumstance, one person gets to the be the solid boat or the steady airplane and another person gets to be the kid that latches on and tumbles upside down with joy, fearing the ground but never really imagining she or he will hit it.

Tonight as I (try not to) reflect too much on the danger of lips (including but also beyond the tactile: words, specifically), I share these photos of my grandnieces and I making awkward, happy faces last week -- all but one taken by a person no taller than my waist who cannot pronounce the letter combination th and who endlessly begged to use my camera.

Do I look like I'm hiding here to you?
That my internal/external body has armored itself with a series of mistakes, not always mine but sometimes definitely mine?

I don't have a far-fetched idolization of a never-achieved idyllic childhood.
I do have a somewhat far-fetched idolization of an often-achieved idyllic interaction with the children in my family.

It makes me feel like I'm not a fortress. I can't figure out which feeling takes precedence.

"I was looking back to see if you were looking back to see."

*

I bought a thrift-store camera at the Salvation Army last week. Put batteries in it, loaded an expired roll of film.
Toward the end of the film -- and hankering to finish it quickly -- I took the camera to the bath with me.

The truth is that I shoot photos of myself in the bathroom and/or myself in the bathtub often.
And 90% of the time, it's because I'm attempting to finish a roll of film that seems endless.

Which means I end up taking a lot of these images:

early morning sleepy hair

toenails like Skittles

proofs that my face existed, almost interrupted by the light

This fairly small, reliable camera is nice because, well, it's small and reliable.
But it refuses to focus on anything that's less than five feet from the lens.

(I'm giving away why I got frustrated with it and set it aside after shooting only 15 or so images.)

BUT!
Ms. Smarty Pants that I am, it only took me a week and a half to realize I could set the timer and pretty much shoot as closely as I could possibly want, if I didn't mind the focus being oddly placed, which I decidedly don't.

In this moment of not-such-Genius, I conjured this shot:

fingers made up of too much flesh

Next, inclined to shoot a fairly matter-of-fact tourist self-portrait in the bathtub, I placed the camera on a stack of odds and ends that rose up on the back of my toilet. Seeing this image in positive print gave me a sense of the uncanny. Not because of any one special attribute. Except that maybe it's because it lacks any One Special Attribute. I generally rely on visual poetics to portray an intensely inner or intensely outer exchange, and seeing an image of myself (taken by me) that had no distracting accoutrements was abrupt to say the least.

But if you know anything about me, then you know that there's Nothing

Nothing

Nothing

I like more than an abrupt realization of the self, including the image-self.

that I was looking back at me...

The above photo was my second-to-last shot on the roll. Figuring I would finish my film with another similar shot, I pointed the camera lens at the stack of books etc. that worked as a make-shift tripod, focused the shot and then pressed the shutter -- only to realize I had not set the timer.

So below is an image of my tripod: new journal, a book on film apparatus, a collection of Bataille stories (with an introduction written by Mishima) and a clear box of mix-and-match bath salts:

navel-ish gazing

She asks me who I'm looking for, and I say no one, and that is a lie.

* * *

Tonight, right now, I am listening to Airhead's Pyramid Lake and looking at images of a vacation home, photographs I didn't take of a man I don't know naked in the driver's seat of a truck with gray interior and five cloudy rectangles (once ice cubes) at the bottom of a perfect whiskey tumbler from which I instead sipped gin. 

And I'm eating animal crackers. (Did you know I love animal crackers?)

I'm purposefully not looking at email. I'm purposefully not thinking about my camera sitting on the pink Formica table in the kitchen and how I promised myself that I would shoot at least five photos before midnight. I'm purposefully not reading the Ames essay Herzog, Landscape and Documentary, even if La Soufrière made me exquisitely happy and I'm genuinely curious if anyone else feels the same.

Since I've typed this, the music's changed. It changed to something embarrassing that I don't want to admit here (though you may have already been privy to my stumbling upon it a few days ago), and then I skipped ahead a few songs to James Blake. Who helps me to feel that unsteady sensations are the only rocks. I keep returning to the Paul Schrader heard earlier this evening: Existentialism asks if it matters that we exist; Post-Modernism asks the same question but puts quotation marks around the word exist.

Once, someone asked me if, like a tourist or a diarist, I take photos as proof that I'd been there, experienced that.

I don't know how to write this without sounding self-deprecating, which I do not mean, but...

I think the photos I take like a tourist or diarist inside my own body and living my own life are proof of how little it matters --

that there is Affect in abundance but no Effect --

and that it's this Effect-less-ness that makes me endorphin-crazy, over-the-moon, filled-with-pleasantries happy --

no matter where I am or what I experience or how the flowers smell like shoelaces and waterfall mist. No matter that a charming woman in a house-dress always lives behind a neighborhood cemetery and offers you sun-tea from over her fence in the middle of the day. No matter how many photos you take of trees in drugstore parking lots. Whether or not my eye appears in every glass fold of every mirror, or that I have to make the block once more, twice more to get a good view of curtains in a window.

I've moved onto jazz. The desire to tell you more has subsided, and now I want to dance.
And to close my eyes. And to fuck those five photos I have not and will not take.

And to lay the side of my face on this cold wooden table upon which, right now, my knee presses with all its might.

* * *