two trips, two mediums, two albums
Songs are how I process, photographs are how I dream.
Making the photograph and writing the song are both made with magic. The moment happens, and hopefully you catch it. The recording of a song, and the making of a print is where all the fun begins.
Working in the darkroom taught me how to write songs. So much time is spent waiting, listening to the darkroom sounds. One of my favorite parts of making work is walking across the room to look at the work from afar. To see how the passerby sees it, to make sure the print is legible. When thinking of how a group of images could flow on a wall, next to one another, is how I think about the order of songs on an album. How a listener might experience the album as a whole.
Slow down the hustle, the internet isn’t forever. There is no rush in making art.
Often, the more time spent, the better the work.
The album is a gallery wall, and how the songs fit on the wall matters. There are these small steps that have a large impact on the whole piece. I find myself enamored by the moments in between the capture, and the presentation. Depending on where you might find me, I might make some great claim of how one of these steps are my favorite steps in the whole gamut.
Prints Sale!
new prints will appear in the store leading up to
the next Acre Memos album and Photo Book…
The In-Between Times
DRAFT
So much of photography is the act of slowing down.
I just want the work to give you what that moment gave me. Connection within photography. Writing a song has always been the same dream. I just want to know that I'm not the only one, and that you are with me, as I am with you. With a song, or a photograph, I hope to let those dreams play. To feel for a moment you weren’t a part of, yet you remember.
Making a photograph gives me the time to connect with these moments, for just a little longer. Emmet Gowin describes this as, “a means of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human and another.” To study their place in a composition and the light sitting beside them. I spent most of my time photographing on purpose, inspired by the works of Julia Margret Cameron and George Davidson, and the way Jeff Wall revisits memories when creating a photograph. Tripod locked in, the kids ready to stand still for their uncle’s art project. I found much joy in this process, and have to recommend this method for how it taught me to slow down. So much of photography is the act of slowing down. Just like drawing a still life, we take in each line and reflection, studying the absolute of an object. The process of making a photograph can be so much of this. I leaned into this method while in school, for a small body of work called, The Acre. There is no objection to this method, but only it required me to dig into memories that I have exhausted… and the kids all grew up and left. The stories that drove most of that work, continued on in the songs I wrote for A Collection of Bird Songs.