Picking Up the Thread

Yesterday's shoot with Minda was my first since the round of shoots I did with male models that ended in July. The business of recreating myself and adding art to how I live my life is a stop-start process, something I should know by now but still strikes me anew every time.

Shooting models remains my first love in image-making. Reviewing photos as I processed and uploaded them this morning to Flickr and Smugmug, I am surprised at how good these images look even as I feel I am just scratching the surface of what I can do and really want to do.

After purchasing the mini-DV tape player last month, I have not worked with it since. I tried it out to make sure it worked but I've resisted doing actual work with it. I need to re-tape the interview I did of Sean. Of all the videos that I have shot, that alone strikes me as something I want to keep and work on. What I want to do with this seed video keeps changing. I want to create a video good enough for theatrical release. Increasingly, with my time and talent constraints, I think the best I could do is a documentary-type movie. 

Watching Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs this weekend inspired me. That was basically a documentary. He had gathered friends in an apartment in Chicago and over the course of a month shot them acting out scenes they improvised in collaboration with Joe. His accomplishment, what critics have called "mumblecore" is heralded as a new movement in independent filmmaking. Plot is secondary to conversations among normal-looking, young Americans doing what comes to them naturally. This is not the cinematic stuff Hollywood is producing. Large-scale scenes of heart-pounding scenery is replaced by intimate close-up scenes of people talking to each other in everyday lingo. The impact turns upon the trivial exchanges we make with each other that in our recollection of the day's activities are infinitely more important than any World News item. It's Web 2.0 catapulted to the big screen.

Relationships are my one persistent obsession. My days are relived scenes of relationships, of people discovering things about themselves, often alone but usually in relation to someone else. Alone our insights stagnate. In exchanges with someone or some others old views are fertilized and take on energy that feels very much like creative juice.

I want to continue taking still photographs of individual models but I also want to push into the interior of my psyche to create videos and text products. I don't know what products will see the light of public viewing but increasingly my faith grows: taking one step at a time, keeping close to what Joe Campbell called my "bliss," concepts take root and concrete products shaped. The process is as tantalizing as the products themselves.