Seattle Viaduct
Tag: self
Dublin
I just watched an amazing scene in a movie
and then I wrote an email to a friend of mine.
Here are some pictures.
2013 07 29 Where
I dont know how to do lots of things. There has always been heavy doubt in me. Its been my defining role in life. “I just dont know.”
Since returning from India, the act of leaving, going away and doing something –anything– the dont know seems less prevalent then it once was. Manifesting what I want seems a nudge easier then it was, but I still dont exactly know what I’m doing, and there is something in me that says now, that something will work out. Thats never before, been the light at the end of the tunnel for me. Theres always been this horrible sense of doubt and disbelief, where it comes from I cant exactly say, probably somewhere in my upbringing and whatever negative experiences that I accrued along the way and never learned from.
2013 06 18 BACK
Where to start.
I dont know. I have so many things to say, people to talk to, to fill in the gaps of information on the things that Ive been doing and so on etc. Its great to be back and I feel a sense of simplicity, and a sense of having some handle on the future like I haven not had in such a long time, and those past sentiments are something I done even remember to be honest. I’m happy not remember it either, but somewhere in there Id like to know what to watch out for so that I can try and avoid it in the future too. I dont know if Ill necessarily ever actually get back to that same point again, but approaching it scares me. Jenny is positive, extremely so, especially considering all that she has gone through. It amazes me her integrity despite her own convictions that she has been really struggling, because from where I’m standing she is the strongest person I think Ive ever seen.
2013.05.30 BOMBAY
Bombay, not Mumbai. I prefer it, and the Bombers themselves call it Bombay anyway.
Its as hot as Goa was, but the humidity levels are off the charts. What I thought was humid in Goa was just for starters. Here its totally and completely insane. It takes 20 minutes to sweat out a liter of water. I go nowhere without a 2L bottle of Bisleri. Bisleri is the nice brand of water in India. Its an Indian company started by a French couple who came here some time ago and scoffed at the lack of good clean drinking water in bottles. Since then of course, there are others. Bailey, which is harder to find, but equally as good and the same price. 1L bottles are about 15 rupees, 2L bottles are 25 rupees, depending of course if you ask the price, because most street vendors will try and hoodwink you and make you pay more even thought he price is moderately unclearly marked on the bottles themselves. The Batch Number, date and Price “(inclusive of all taxes)”. But I still like to ask because I like to see the honesty levels of the vendors. Most outside of Goa and so far Bombay, are not honest and some, even when you show them the price will argue the price with you. Old school values; haggle. Theres no haggling in America. We are soft now, lazy, the price is the price. I still like to ask for a deal when I have to go to the Apple store just to fuck with the doe-eyed whizz-kid clerks. Who cares if Steve Jobs had $750,000,000,000 in the bank before he stepped out, he shouldn’t have had that much money anyway, he should have by virtue of the fact that he travelled India himself, known that that money would have been better off in the hands of those who know what to do with it to make their days a little brighter. Like those tribal families out there on the street in front of the hostel Im currently in. They are rolling with the rats, and their children are playing cricket and badminton amongst the traffic “OUT”! I saw that, that was out! Ballard market, haha what a fucking Joke, ‘fixed prices’ total and complete bullshit.
Oh look at that Im sweating as I’m shitting here in relative comfort of porcelain three floors above you, and the little brown children with blue string around their waists are dropping their payloads into cracks in the pavement. Their shit is cleaner then yours though -and you fucking better believe it.
Easy as Piety
Dublin, Ireland.
I shot this about a decade or more ago, a dull average nondescript day I had some things to do in town and I was rushing around, I saw this as I walked onto a busy pedestrian street. I made the shot and I dont remember consciously knowing why I made it because I had grown up in a conservative country which was on the cusp of rapid cultural and economic changes which were going to change everything in a massive way.
People like these, typically people who had no children of their own, (in many cases spinsters and bachelors who had been children during the war themselves) who protested abortion in a visually extreme manner before, who, one can only presume, had some compelling force the drive them to dedicate their lives and sanity to promoting such incredibly vile and repugnant imagery in a way as shock everyone young and old into their way of seeing their political standpoint.
As soon as the economy started to visually change the anti-abortionists disappeared from society but would return with a new younger generation as soon as the economy growth slowed.
Negativity begets negativity.
I remember this man trying to engage her on some philosophical hook and her response was tight lipped religious piety.
Caretakered Growth Avenues
I don’t really show the pictures of the people that interest me the most because I don’t think I have the narrative to back it up in its own right yet, and flickr isn’t the forum for that work either, I’ve kind of dug myself into a hole there withe whole street and what I defined as the kind of street I wanted in Seattle Street and which has generally become accepted as an acceptable version of that decisive, contemplative, gag, style, which doesn’t really rely on any level of intellectual insight to understand or appreciate, the pictures of the people I am really drawn to are highly reliant on my audience being open to seeing something that they normally don’t even register and having their attention drawn to it, ..and so it’s been my belief that my Audience is infact not American at all.
See Street photography has become about shooting the oddities and the highlights of the everyday or at least that’s the premise; using the “everyday” as an excuse to make pictures of things that stand out of that “everyday” entity which really doesn’t mean what it is in that context anymore. Look at the London Street Photography festival as it stands now, at 3 years old, and all of the pictures have a basic sameness to them and a sensationalism to them which irritates me now.
Seattle street in a similar way has now got a formula too, which is fine, it’s human nature and ultimately it’s ‘caretakered’ itself, and its my baby but I feel like I have other avenues to grow.
