midweek post: timing

As a creator, I've been thinking about timing. I'm not talking about photography's relationship with time or making a project about "time" whatever that means. I mean timing and artistic practice in general. In my studio, I spent last week preparing for a staged photo-shoot, which takes a different kind of timing, one of patience for all the right elements to come together. Last week, I also made a book and I'm quite pleased with the outcome (photos to come). For my staged photographs, it is admittedly a slower process because of the cooperation involved. Honestly, I worry that because I slow down to make my staged photographs, I'll miss deadlines for shows and other opportunities. And also, I become antsy at the outset of a new project. A lot of ideas have been cooking for a while. But forcibly churning out work never turns out well in my experience. 

Yesterday, I looked at the sky and decided without any plan, to shoot at a location I wanted to visit for a while. The light looked good and it was decidedly beautiful when I went there. It could be simply an exercise or it could be the start of something else. Below are some rough edits from the shoot.

A lot of photographers, or the ones who have caught my eye lately, make photos of sites where an upsetting event has transpired (or a body has been dumped) and they make bucolic images as a way to honor the victims/those involved in the tragedy. While my project is not as noble (I don’t think), it is about violence and, tangentially, masculinity. I decided to do both staged portraits based on local news headlines and to visit places like the one below that seem bucolic but are significant for other, more gloomy reasons. I'm not sure how the two approaches will synthesize, but I am glad I trusted my impulsiveness yesterday-as "new age, whatever will be, will be" as that sounds.