Monday, November 8, 2010

On Becoming an Art School Statistic

I almost didn't make a post this month. To be honest I actually haven't shot anything in over a month and have instead been taking a break from making any work until I get my life together. I have come to the very painful realization that at this point in my life, I really need a real day job to keep a roof over my head while I scrounge together enough time to make and develop my art. Thus I have enrolled in a TEFL certification program so I can teach English domestically and abroad and will be busy trying to support my broke ass for the next couple of months or so.

All that being said, I do have some projects in the works right now, and for my five loyal readers I can promise that come winter I will have some interesting work put up. But until then, this is what I've got.

I seem to have fallen into a somewhat predictable working method, I take something that I really don't like and see if I can turn it into something I do. If there is one particular genera of photography I find absolutely uninteresting or feel no connection to, it would have to be definitively landscape photography (an Ansel Adams fan, I am not). I grew up in the suburbs of Boston and have lived in cities for the last five years of my life, in short I have never really been much of a nature person. That is to say, I really didn't get the whole loving the great out doors thing until I tried it for myself.

Back in September, my family took a trip to Yellowstone national park, a time that I like to refer to as the "Tang Style Family Vacation Technique." Looking around as we touched down in Salt Lake city and prepare for the long drive into the park, things started to click for me. I had never seen a place with so much wide open space, and I started to see why some people are so crazy about spending time outside. If I were constantly surrounded by such majestic beauty, I probably wouldn't want to send much time indoors either. As I looked around and marveled at the sublime power of nature I began to understand why I once so steadfastly and ignorantly hated nature photography. Because I had never been to those kinds of majestic places that you often seen in sierra club calendars, I had no way of relating to them. However, with time and experience our tastes change, and things that once seemed so important way back when, may not seem so important now.






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