All my life, I'd always thought, "If you can't be good, you should at least be funny." And realizing very early on in my photographic career that I would never be good, I decided that I was going to do my best to be funny.
Let's face it, there's no shame, I don't have the dedication that it takes to be a really good photographer. Being good means getting up at 4:30 in the morning and trecking to some mountain top because you think there might be an interesting sunrise that day and then going off to work at 8:00 when there isn't and going back the next day to do it all over again. It means meticulously filing away your negatives, numbering your prints, keeping accurate records, it means pushing your models saying "we'll break later, we have three more shots to do." rather than my directorial tendencies which side with " ... Aw fuck it, we'll finish this later, let's go to the pub." My photographic work has suffered from this, my portfolio has suffered from this, but hey, I tell myself, I'm a network engineer, not a photographer. So my portfolio's about ten percent of what it should be, and there are all these ideas dangling in the back of my head (I still want to do "ten prom stories" but who knows when I'll get the motivation?) The Photo-A-Week Project snapped me out of that, to some extent, I was carrying a camera in my pocket everywhere, I'd always done that, but I was more conscious about getting up now and going outside after the storm if I thought there may be a rainbow and I preset my exposure when I stepped into the shade -- just in case. I'd started doing the Photo-A-Week thing because someone or someone's on the Leica Users Group suggested we do it. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And in retrospect, it was still a good idea. I learned a lot over the past 52 weeks. I learned, and here I can be bold for no one seems to agree with me and I'm usually catching up on trends about four years after they're no longer trendy, for all intents and purposes film is dead. Within the next five years, everything will be digital. Nobody wants to wait hours or days for their photos when they can see them instantly. All that remains before the funeral is ready is a higher resolution CCD chip and a moderately priced pro-level camera. Flame away. I learned that taking one photograph a week that you're not embarrassed of is a lot more difficult than I'd initially thought. I learned though that the constant deadline is the impetus to work and that many of the images I have, both published and unpublished, I would not have were it not for this project. I learned that I can't take a street photo. I carry my camera on the street with me all the time. All of my street photos, with very few exceptions are blurry, out of focus, too far away, or just un-interesting. I've stopped trying. About halfway through the year I found a project that truely interested me -- and I realized that my photographs could tell a story that was important and poignant rather than just silly. This started when I met Emily, a twenty-two year old Philadelphia model who cut herself.
I became much more interested the reinvention of self by the re-shaping of the body. Perpetually unhappy with my own body image I got embroiled in bodybuilding and in the dull pain of the 45th Lateral Dumbell Press, suddenly things began to make sense -- my friends at the gym were exhibiting an awful lot of the same behavior that Emily was. I had weight lifters who spent two hours a day in the weight room and sometimes limited their food intake to 800 calories for days on end (to make their skin cover their muscles like a sheet of waxed rice paper) telling me that they thought they looked terrible that they wouldn't go outside without baggy clothes on, and I had people telling me "my skin is a prison, I want to cut myself free."
Some of my bodybuilder friends were pretty happy
with their appearance though, like
Ron who I
photographed for Week 46. When looking at the proofs he said "I can't
believe I look like that. It's unreal." And it is unreal,
a bodybuilder is only in "top" physical shape for two or three days
at the most. "Top" physical condition often means headaches, dizziness,
vomiting, or even blackouts. Some will gain 10 or more pounds in the
two days following a competition, their bodies starved for fat.
When people look in the mirror, they don't always see themselves looking back. I became concerned with what we're telling our daughters and our sons with the toys and ideals that we give them. It's good to have attainable goals, I believe that. And it's good to feel that you have control over your body and your body image. But when these things are exaggerated and parents aren't available or peer groups are unwilling or unable to help children understand these images, permanent damage can be done. I'm not just talking about Barbie's over-documented bust, but boys action figures where impossible brawn is used to terrorize and destroy. Where Mark Hammil's new Star Wars action figure look nothing like the scrawny hero of the film, but more like a pro-wrestler who could tear a phone book in half. Another strange thing happened on the way to the gym: Sometime early on in the year I realized that I really didn't care about cameras as much as I thought I had in the past. Sure, I'd still flip to the back of the book to see what kind of camera Nan Golden was using but I was suddenly uninterested in collecting weird camera parts. I sold my Nikon F's and F2's, stopped buying redundant glass just because it had a cool lens shade, put a bunch of half working SLR's into a box and dropped them at the Second Mile thrift store, and to reflect this, I stopped putting camera information on my photo pages. One vow I took was "no more broken cameras". This meant my M3 had to go -- I was tired of losing a shot to not having the exposure set properly or forgetting to look through the right viewfinder to focus. I wasn't going to compromise my final product so that I could say I'd taken it with a substandard camera, getting the shot was now of paramount importance. Anything I needed tack sharp I shot in medium or large format, but for the bulk of my work, I still used 35mm. The Canon QL-17 replaced the M3 as my backup camera -- most of my work stuff was still shot with the F100 but if the pace was slow, I'd use the M6. There's no way I can rewind film as fast as the F100 and loading an M6 takes ages when the candidate's moving along the line. I photographed a lot of sweaty politicians this year. In fact, one viewer wrote to say that it seemed to be my main point of interest. Perhaps. I had a splendid time at the Republican National Convention, even if I didn't get out of bed early enough to catch the soccer match between the Communists and the Anarchists at Broad and Walnut.
Possibly the biggest thing I learned this year is that everybody wants to have their picture taken. You can walk up to people on the street and ask to photograph them. Not only that, but you end up becoming friends with some of them. Cultivating that ability, to walk up to someone and just start talking was the hardest thing for me. I'm looking forward to another year of photographs and, more importantly, I'm looking forward to a year of LUG photos. kyle cassidy
january 1, 2001 |
