Does That Make Me NOT a Photographer?
I have been feeling a greater and greater need these days to make artifacts. Not just simple photographs, but things that are unique, individual, solitary items. A lot of what I want to make involves some sort of photography, but not all of it. There are a lot of things that I want to make that have nothing to do with photography. It is starting to concern me from a perspective of getting an MFA in photography. And there is something else that is bothering me, too. One of the elements of photography, one of its driving principles is the concept of reproducibility. One image printed thousands of times over again that makes a tangible, visual impact. That is what a photograph is. Digital media just make that a more pronounced and immediate phenomena, but it has been that way since the advent of collodian wet plate photography. A glass negative that you can make a positive image from, as many times as you like. My images, my artifacts, are not true to the medium in that regard. They are completely unique, more so even than a hand crafted print by Ansel Adams in that there are several stages of creation, several steps to ultimately craft something different, something new, something that can only be found in one time and place, in a tangible form.
It started a while ago, even at the beginning of this project, where six negatives would be sandwiched together, printed, and then a contact print made. That many steps make the likelihood of direct duplication more remote. Not impossible, but less likely. But what I am doing now, what I am making in my kitchen (quite literally) cannot even be called images. They contain images, but they make no statement about the medium, nothing in them screams "This woman is a photographer!" But I am not certain if that is a good thing or a bad thing. Yes it's true that there is a part of me that would rather not be labeled, a part that would exhibit sculpture next to drawing next to photograph, a part that I suppose would be labeled "artist" but I also admit a fierce loyalty to the medium, to that place where I first engaged my creativity.
In some senses I am worried about this new direction because it provides, yet again, more uncertainty than clarity. I need a little clarity right now. But the alternative seems loathsome as well. The alternative seems to be doing a project of Rin or tiny little shots of real ravens or even self portraits, but all of those seem like easy steps. They seem like giving up.
I have a successful photographer friend right now that I keep watching with some amount of jealousy. He is one of my dearest friends from back in the undergraduate program. He has come into his own as a commercial photographer with style and grace. His work is phenomenal, and it is 100% his. There is never any question of which image on the board was crafted from his quirky perspective. Getty now sells his images. The reason I look at him with some questioning is that he and I were always the top of the class. We were side by side in our advancement. Admittedly in two totally different veins, but we were growing together into commercial photographers. When I split from him and the others and shifted into the MFA two things started to happen: 1) he continued to grow and excel in a viable commercial sphere, 2) I started to get further and further from that categorization. Now he is going to run off to New York and take over the world, and it seems that I a doomed to live in a self-created obscurity. Sometimes I kick myself because I left the program, soul's ambition be damned. (Major problem here would be that the aforementioned soul's ambition has been so massively elusive as to cause general cardiac and pulmonary issues.) And now it seems that I am damning even photography in my work. There is hardly any of it left. And what is there are the last of my Polaroids, soon to be as dried up as my photographic ambition.
So what does all of this mean? Does this make me not a photographer?
It started a while ago, even at the beginning of this project, where six negatives would be sandwiched together, printed, and then a contact print made. That many steps make the likelihood of direct duplication more remote. Not impossible, but less likely. But what I am doing now, what I am making in my kitchen (quite literally) cannot even be called images. They contain images, but they make no statement about the medium, nothing in them screams "This woman is a photographer!" But I am not certain if that is a good thing or a bad thing. Yes it's true that there is a part of me that would rather not be labeled, a part that would exhibit sculpture next to drawing next to photograph, a part that I suppose would be labeled "artist" but I also admit a fierce loyalty to the medium, to that place where I first engaged my creativity.
In some senses I am worried about this new direction because it provides, yet again, more uncertainty than clarity. I need a little clarity right now. But the alternative seems loathsome as well. The alternative seems to be doing a project of Rin or tiny little shots of real ravens or even self portraits, but all of those seem like easy steps. They seem like giving up.
I have a successful photographer friend right now that I keep watching with some amount of jealousy. He is one of my dearest friends from back in the undergraduate program. He has come into his own as a commercial photographer with style and grace. His work is phenomenal, and it is 100% his. There is never any question of which image on the board was crafted from his quirky perspective. Getty now sells his images. The reason I look at him with some questioning is that he and I were always the top of the class. We were side by side in our advancement. Admittedly in two totally different veins, but we were growing together into commercial photographers. When I split from him and the others and shifted into the MFA two things started to happen: 1) he continued to grow and excel in a viable commercial sphere, 2) I started to get further and further from that categorization. Now he is going to run off to New York and take over the world, and it seems that I a doomed to live in a self-created obscurity. Sometimes I kick myself because I left the program, soul's ambition be damned. (Major problem here would be that the aforementioned soul's ambition has been so massively elusive as to cause general cardiac and pulmonary issues.) And now it seems that I am damning even photography in my work. There is hardly any of it left. And what is there are the last of my Polaroids, soon to be as dried up as my photographic ambition.
So what does all of this mean? Does this make me not a photographer?
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