Just a little post, with a few things to say. I’ve been walking the same streets a lot lately (which may have been evident by the two posts about the mission, or all the odd salon posts, etc). And there’s a vein in photographic thought that echoes the popular sentiment: that if you’re not doing something new, you’re not doing something worthwhile. St Winogrand said something along the lines of “I never want to take the same picture twice.”

So what does going against that guidance get you? Well, the first picture here is one I’ve attempted dozens of times. Not every morning at the train, but many of them. A lot with just my phone camera. They never are quite what I had in mind, but each iteration is closer; there’ll be a cluster of some that kinda work, and then a long fallow period where nothing sticks, and then one like this comes along and just knocks me back. it’s close enough here that I imagine I might be able to pull a print from it that is what I actually want.

Fences, alleys: you’ve seen those, too. I’m super curious what the hell Boner Dog was. Now it’s an empty lot, of course, but it looks like there wasn’t ever even a slab in that lot. So what was there?

Odd Salon: never predictable, always interesting. The for-real devil came up on stage and drank whiskey at us. Maybe there’s a sameness to the practice that makes me call it the same things, and it feels like I’m shooting the same things, but only in the moment. I always say you can’t tell anything about how good the pictures are in the moment; I think that may apply to this idea of ‘sameness’ that I have in my head, too.

The pictures aren’t the same, they can’t be; Everything moves, everything changes. The light is never the same. I always thought re-photography seemed like a gimmick, a little hollow. But the idea of looking for ‘equivalents’, that is, things that are emotionally the same, or at least feel the same, that’s something really interesting.

Posted by Matt on 2018-07-14T06:39:41Z GMT