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Lessons in how to let go. (aka stop trying to purify the image by erasing the world around it.)

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steven meisel for vogue italia, 8/04

(Source: foudre, via l-oeuvre-au-noir)

twin, twinning, & twinned: an interview.

Aside from some radio interviews I’ve done in the past, I’ve never really been interviewed about my work. I was asked to do a small interview for the blog of The Collagist, who published a few chapters from my memoir draft. Check it out if you’d like!

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The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.

But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place.

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Jonathan Gottschall, author of the excellent The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, on why fiction is good for you. (via explore-blog)

(via dunnraw)

I have a tendency, when making photos, to always want my photo to be in relationship to concept. I know why I have this tendency. I don’t trust my ability to make a beautiful photo, or at least, I know so many visual artists - painters and sculptors and photographers, both living and dead, both familiar and unknown to me - that I feel that I can never compete. Part of the reason I feel this way, the reason I distance myself from the art I can make is so that I can stay close to them. If I want to be always striving to be a better image-maker, will I lose the ability to regard them as my influence, as my inspiration, as my mentor(s)? If the artists whose work I love, who help me so much, if I become one of them, will it distance us? I have a very hard time owning my own value and power as an artist, more so with the visual art I make than with anything else. I don’t want to ever be better than anyone else - this is about being a twin, I think - because the disconnection I feel so strongly with my twin sister, our relationship is an impossible one, for reasons within us and outside of us - it is so painful, it fills me with longing and sadness and anger and just intense, abstract feelings of hurt - that it is very hard for me to be in competition with those that I feel such good feelings for and from, such lovely and loving feelings of connection and growth and generosity and positive, energetic movement.

But, in feeling this way, I have a tendency to be so afraid of ego, of narcissism, that I distance myself from the very world that has so much value for me.

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And so, because I don’t trust my ability to make a photo that is a good photo on its own - just pure aesthetic value - I instead focus on a concept, on an emotional or psychological underpinning - this keeps it mine, keeps it relevant - if not to others, at least to me.

But, I am always trying to push past my challenges and the limits I place on myself that are not so healthy for me.

One of the ways I do this is to try and make images that I am drawn to, for beauty’s sake, no concept or emotional subtitle necessary.

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I am drawn to Agnes Martin. I can give you theories as to why (with me, there are always theories!). But, really, the fact is that looking at her work just makes me feel good. Agnes Martin’s paintings feel like stepping into a temple or a cathedral. I feel excited and joyful, and I feel calm.

Whatever this is that I am drawn to in her, I am also drawn to in the patterns that the trunks of trees form. I know I am not the only one.

And for the moment, I’m okay with that.

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Here’s a bit of Agnes for you on a Saturday afternoon, and a bit of me (connecting to Agnes).

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They tell you in school never to end with another’s words. But, today, I want to.

I think our minds respond to things beyond this world. Take beauty: it’s a very mysterious thing, isn’t it?  I think it’s a response in our minds to perfection. It’s too bad, people not realizing that their minds expand beyond this world.—Agnes Martin.

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I met someone new who was also someone familiar over the past week. Her name is Gem, aka Gemma, aka Gemma Lily. This is a photo of a reflection of her looking at photos of her taken by another person new to her, but also familiar.

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I set my alarm early yesterday morning, at 7 am, and I don’t even have to go to work officially for three months. In my house I have a door to a front porch. I don’t ever go on the front porch because it’s upstairs, the flooring secured by boards that seem rotten and while I’m sure I won’t fall through, it makes me nervous. The door has a pane of glass that’s cut into squares by the kind of door it is. And so early in the morning, it stripes the light in front of a mirror. I could take self portraits there with this newly lent manual camera I’m playing with all morning.

So, I did.

And, I did something wrong.

All but five shots were blank on the film.

And I have no earthly idea what happened. I’m gonna assume I forgot to change the shutter speed, or didn’t load the film the right way.

So, now I am doing something I thought I was altogether too lazy to do. That is, explore, play with different shutter speeds here and there with the same series of photos.

Just so I can get it right.

I’ve heard of this all the time, but I always saw myself as different than those that open themselves up to make mistakes.

But, the thing is, the first roll of film I got gave me the shots I wanted, better than I wanted, that I didn’t think I was capable of making.

And that has gotten me to push forward and to play in a way I never thought possible of myself.

I am shooting through a manual camera for the first time. Looking through this lens fills me with joy. I can finally see the way light hits on an object or a face or a stalk of grass when I look through the glass, and I love the way it outlines what’s in focus, everything else left behind.

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I’ve been sleeping a lot at night. I think it must be the heat, and my full days in the heat of late. These were taken around 6:30 in the morning, when the light was just waking up.

I am so, so, so excited about this. Excited enough to wake up wondering: what pretty things can I shoot today?