World of One: Commodum

Commodum (from the series World of One)

"Good luck seldom walks in pairs, but bad luck never walks alone" - Chinese Proverb

Apologies to my regular readers – New York life has been kicking my ass recently, which is why I hadn't been making any posts for the last two months. My free time was swallowed whole by the apartment hunt monster, which left me with mere crumbs of time to produce any artwork. The apartment hunting process led me to ponder on the nature of opportunity, and how I could go about finding more of it. Commodum, the image I present to you today, was inspired by this thought process. It is titled after the Latin word for "opportunity," which also implies convenience, and favorable timing. I guess you could say this image represents my more optimistic feelings towards the nature of opportunity – the preparation and self help part of it, the part we are able to control. Hopefully in the coming weeks I'll get the chance to shoot a follow up to this image, one which reveals my more skeptical views on how opportunity works.

Commodum was shot on a beautiful Sunday in Central Park in mid April, largely as the backup plan for a similar shot I had planned at a nearby location. As my assistant and I were walking to my first location choice, I was constantly distracted by the cherry blossoms that were in full bloom, demanding my attention. When my plans for the original shot was foiled by inadequate lighting and too many people, I jumped at the chance to create a follow up to The Stranger, which I also shot under blooming cherry blossoms in April of 2013.

While I'm not thrilled with the end result, because little things such as not having a small platoon of Johnnys in the background bother me, I do consider this image a success. I mean, at the very least, I think it's pretty to look at. Had there been more safe real estate for me to position myself on, I might have been able to get exactly the image I wanted, but alas that was not the case. Certainly some mistakes were made, but, then again, art is all about knowing which mistakes to keep.

Special thanks to the beautiful William Pie Yuan for assisting me with this shoot! Sorry you had to wait so long to see the end result homie!!!