It's a happy enchilada and you think you're gonna drown.

The title of this post is an inside joke to Hannah and Harry, if they ever read this. Hopefully they get it, random childhood memory. . .

Yesterday Eva and Dustin and I explored the Gold Hill area, and found this awesome location. Thanks to Eva for suggesting this photo expedition and Dustin for having so many great ideas in mind and driving us there. . .

Coming up to this location was a great concrete bridge. Here I am looking dead again.

Almost the entire floor of this building was covered with a half of an inch of water, creating beautiful reflections.

Creepy portrait, but I really like how the light is treating my face here. The lace-like grid on the door of the old electric room is amazing.

Can you see my face in the water?

Naturally I had to hide in the corner at least once.

Thanks Eva and Dustin!

There's more from this day, a roll I haven't finished plus some other places we explored, although this was by far the best location that day. I will probably post some more plus a couple outtakes in another entry. . . Eva of course took some pictures as well so I will post a link to her blog when she posts them (although you can always access her blog, Eye Wonder, from my sidebar, "Other Photo Blogs")

O'er near exit 19

My lovely driver Tia took me out to a roofless house near exit 19. It was a sunny day. She read in the grass while I performed/made photographs in the space. The melodic beep of my camera's self timer lulled her off to sleep.

The space I found was excellent. I interacted with it. This is what came of it.

Doors and windows. . .

Always hiding from the light. . .

Performing in space. . .

I am beginning to think of billing myself as a "performance artist." The longer I spend as an art student the more I become accustomed to the fact that an artist is as much the persona he or she projects as the work he/she does. I don't want to go as far as Warhol, but I recognize how I market my working methods are at least as important as the work created. That is, if I ever want to depend on my art for my income, which I don't necesarily want to do. That being said, I do perform in these spaces. The more I am asked about my working methods the more I find that it is true. I find so much inspiration from the space, it is literally an elated feeling, because I know the most intriguing spaces yield the most compelling results, the most compelling photographs. I find myself drawn to perform in the space, yet only in the most ambiguous of ways, and sometimes hinting at a narrative, walking through the frame or gazing into the distance. Other times I perform strange or banal actions, seemingly meaningless, perhaps symbolic but not determinably so. I am often hiding, sometimes I seem dead.

So what am I doing? Making photographs? Or documenting a series of mini-performances, enacted alone, no witness but myself and the camera. No proof but the photograph.

I suppose I could think of it that way, but unless it was always me composing the documentation, I would not accept it. And the performance is enacted specifically for the purposes of documentation. And I insist on using color film, not digital. Certainly not the most convenient method to record a performance. So I suppose I hold on to my photographic roots yet.

But when I ask myself, if someone took my camera away, what kind of art would I make, and then I ask myself, if someone took my body away, then what kind of art would I make, well. . . I think I have more trouble answering the second.

Annihilating with light.

Photos from my last location/critique. One of my classmates is renting the house of our regular photo prof, who is on sabatical this year. She invited me to come photograph in this crazy storage shack. The fact that I am photographing on my photo professor's property without her knowing it is just kind of funny to me. Erika, if you read this someday, I hope you don't mind!


This got totally flipped the wrong way but it sort of looks cool and I'm too lazy to fix it right now.

During this critique my photo professor made a comment that I am not using light in its more traditional sense, to reveal, but rather to conceal or annihilate.

So I had made multiple plans this past weekend to photograph in different locations, but unfortunately due to circumstances uncontrollable by everyone, these all fell through. Hopefully tomorrow I'm going to go out and make it to some strong locations, the environments I photograph in seem to be the key to making the strongest photographs. There is more to work with, less to work around, and the more excited and intrigued by the environment the more energy I have, or the more "creative" I get. "Creative" in quotes because my art history professor hates that word. . .

This last shot is probably the only one I will end up using from this series, if any. I will definitley crop it tighter around the figure, though. It's hard to see this small but the light coming in from the right on the shoulder is quite lovely.