I don’t know about you, but I need time to “live” with the photographs I make. I need to see where they fit into the story, or not.
My photographs change over time. Some images that I feel ambivalent about turn into incredible pieces that support the story in new and exciting ways. And some, images that I thought I had hit the lottery with, end up missing the mark completely. It’s a strange sequence or unfolding of how images reveal themselves over time. It’s almost impossible to write how this process actually works. It’s a “lived” experience I guess, but it does work. You just need to be patient and present. Over time, it all comes together.
The way I put a story together involves the “big picture” (no pun) and each individual experience or image I make. The macro and micro if you will. I try to keep the general concept always in my mind and work each image out as the ideas come to me. Sometimes, I spend days or even weeks, looking at something or some composition of a scene. I look at it at different times of the day, week, or month. The flora work that I made is a good example of this concept. I watched as each plant changed over the months of summer. Growing, flowering, and going to seed. I could do an entire body of work on the flora here that the Ute/Tabeguache used medicinally and ceremonially. I know these images will be a big part of the final presentation.
There’s the now and there’s the future for the photographs, too. I often think that I’m not making this work for people today but for people in the distant future (death anxiety). I find myself looking at old photographs and reading about photographers and artists that lived a hundred or a thousand years ago. I would like to think I’m contributing something to that “future” viewer’s worldview, the way I appreciate and learn from artists and images from long ago. It does influence me quite a bit.
On that note, I’m back to making more negatives. I’ve decided that I will stay with the Whole Plate format. I’m fully committed (I always have been but was too influenced by the layout ideas for Half Plate). I have to go through these detours to ensure that what I’m doing is the right thing. This detour confirmed that I’m on the right track, 100%.