Organic Photography

When I was in high school we watched a video narrated by Carl Sagan. At one point he was talking about the make up of life and he said something that ended in the phrase "Billions and billions of atoms." If you know Carl Sagan, you know how distinctive his voice and delivery are, so you can understand that why, fifteen years later, I still remember it with proper inflection and aggressive Bs (said properly, there should be some spitting.) This just came to me as I looked over the image of Rin in a previous post. She is starting to multiply and it doesn't seem long before there will be billions and billions of her. Shiver.

There is an inherent hypocrisy in my work. Maybe the same is true for all art and artists, hence the perpetuation of despair. For, you see, I am not immune to the woes and vices that I see in America. I suffer from them as much as anyone. But I hope that the realization of these traits in myself is a sort of healing process, a way out of the muck and mire of transgressions against myself and others. I am self-centered. I often think about myself first and others second, if at all. It isn't something that I am proud of. It is a sad truth, one that I feel is perhaps the greatest crime we suffer in a nation of me-firsters. Perhaps I feel that way because it is one of the things that I hate most about myself, that I fear most when considering being married, having kids. I don't feel as though I am good material to be a partner or a role model. One of my instructors at Brooks once suggested that I partner with a classmate of mine and make a business of our photography toge

Rin is a tricky subject. Tricky because I am certain now of what I am saying with her but having much more difficulty actually convincing others of that message with the images alone. There are certain things that read - Stepford Wives, narcissism, plasticity - but the others don't - over consumption, entitlement, uselessness. It is the latter three that I am trying to push, that I want to demonstrate. As a culture I think we need to understand these vices and move away from them. We need to see what we have become, what we are turning our children into, and stop it, change it, fix it. And Rin is my way of holding up an ugly mirror to hopefully offend people just enough that they realize they hate the imagery because it reveals something nasty about themselves. Of course then the question becomes how do you visualize entitlement? But not just the elite classes entitlement, but this pervasive entitlement that has overtaken the millenial generation? The belief that showing up to clas