Re: problem

[Jack Fulton <jfulton@sfai.edu>]

> From: Sandy King
> > The whole experience has made me quite depressed and I am
> > starting to wonder if it would not be best to simply burn
> > all of them and start from scratch. Is anyone else having
> > similar problems, or is this just a side effect of my
> > bi-polar tendencies?
> Depending on when you started photography, they probably won't
> burn, at all, or they will only with difficulty. Keeping your
> negatives in a cardboard box (non-archival), or a high temp,
> high humidity condition should give you a very high pressure
> to print all valuable images ASAP.
>
> Anyway, I also have the same problem, but I'd rather deal with
> that... than destroying my early images. The more I look at my
> early negatives, I become to want more freedom and time to
> travel around myself with a camera without worrying about
> anything other than burning film... Years ago I drove down to
> New Orleans and I slept in a car parked by the river... out of
> a few days I was there, about the only significant thing I did
> was to take one picture (out of many other pictures that
> aren't important) while sitting at a coffee shop on Bourbon St
> for hours... waiting for something like this to happen... I
> can't do that any more, but I don't know WHY.
These dilemmas of worth are common to the medium's
practitioners. The theorists from the non-user POV have
zeroed in on the image, once made, fades into history and
involved with that is a transient yet permanent form of
loss. They also relate to the finite quality we call death.

My students oft echo Sandy's words and stop doing their
"project" because it is either "not good enough" or it was
deemed to be not as important as a 'new' direction to
take.

Seeing is an adventure. Cognition is about learning what
something is. Re-cognition is about naming and the fun
of the medium is actually fiction, not reality. The medium
purports to 'capture' reality but unless it is robotic (and
even those are programmed for specifics) the description
is based upon re-cognition and the naming of things.

Another fun thing is the rendering and as either Sandy, or
another, said, it becomes boring once mastered for then
perhaps joy then becomes work.

Life is the same thing: learning, experiencing. The sight
and aural (and sexual) parts of this journey while alive
are initially electrifying and so much so one tends to
continue that experience until offset by circumstance.

Since it is all fiction, all constructed by the mind's quick
eye, construed into a semblance of reality, it's the continued
effort, or work, that  maintains the joy. Many, many and many
more, if not most, strive to emulate in our medium and few
have that visual voice of unique timbre for that is a fearful
aspect of one's veriest being to pursue. My pursuit of the
elusive w/my Polyphemus instrument has been constant since
being introduced to the realm of dark room magic when 14. My
thought than, as now, is to live a fun filled helluva life. Out of that
those thin slivers of memory comes the truth of my experience
and knowledge and that is not a pursuit of standards but a forging
of my fiction into myth.