Sooner or later your friends leave the city. They take on townhouses and bedroom communities, renovations and babysitters. They say, “we found a great place in the mountains, man,” and you nod congratulations. It may take as long as the drive upstate, or until the county road yields to a gravel one, but you will come to see that a home is different from an apartment, a place to live is different from a place to stay.
Narrative has the ability to enfold disparate information into a succinct package. Depicting narrative within the space of a single frame is one of the most difficult things to achieve in documentary photography. As a result, narratives are most often parceled out across a series of images. Ten months ago I snapped the first and third pics a day apart on the same block. I had shot the middle one a week earlier, and just a couple blocks away.
The relationship between the images of a lawyer carrying what appears to be a map of some sort of drug pyramid and the back of a corrections department bus might imply the process of crime and punishment without much of a stretch. The third image I shot out of the same impulse shat causes me to shoot an inordinate amount of walls. To my surprise and delight, however, Denzel Washington’s character Frank Lucas emerges from that same garage door in the final scene of American Gangster in a shot not unlike the one above — a door, apparently, from which many convicts have been delivered back into the bosom of the city. And while I have neither the hubris nor the temerity to suggest that the above triptych depicts crime, punishment, and redemption in any essential manner, it is amusing to imagine the many narratives that connect the three places.
—
here’s the wall again.
The laptop and digital camera both decided to depart from working condition on the same week. A return to form needed, wished for, there has been much gray overcast instead.
Considering the fact that I’ve known the (male) subjects of the above photos since before my voice changed, it’s always a special occasion when one of us gets married. About a month ago the number of us married jumped to two, and judging from the canoodling going on in the back of photo no. dos, better than even odds say number three won’t be far off.
If anyone out there has ever attended a wedding in which the groom wore a kilt and a yarmulke please contact me immediately. For the record it was Johnny Walker Blue before the ceremony, plenty of photo ops after, and your boy was working that tux like it was his job. Oh, and the hanging codpiece pocket thing on the front of a kilt that holds cell phones and digital cameras? It’s called a sporn.
Just a quick note: due to server issues I’ve been unable to update this space as I’d like to over the past couple of weeks. I am told that these issues are in the process of being resolved. I’ve even got a couple of posts in the hamper revving to go.
As I’ve noted in my links blog to the right, some of my drivel has found a home (and even sparked some debate) elsewhere on the internet.
Consistently carrying a camera, and more importantly, spending time capturing images can only increase one’s ability to visualize what an image should look like. Ever since codifying one of my own processes, however, I have felt a sort of friction within the working style itself. Is there a way to continue processing depth graphically such that the image appears less flat? Luckily, on the anniversary of my birth a few days ago, the biggest question was ‘how many shots can I pop off before I lose this great light?’
