I have been thinking a lot lately about photography for lots of different reasons.  For one thing, talking about my generation what straddles analog and digital pretty squarely, our hands on our hips, one eye narrowed and forgive me, I don’t mean to sound “goldurnit,” because I know some of a certain age may have in fact invented this shit, but I can’t let go of we take pictures with our telephones.  So there’s that lurking around in my brain both with horror and awe, which may in fact be two different words that describe the same sensation, but I love it at the same time and have come to the conclusion that the iPhone takes a pretty gorgeous landscape photo at the golden hour.  May shine best then, even.

Part of it, too, has to do with wondering what must it be like to teach photography now.  I studied photography all through high school and into my undergraduate studies and as a grad student was a TA and were it not for other choices I made along the way since then I might already know.  Instead, I’ve only had a half conversation with my old friend Tammy Rae when she was in town for a conference three years ago and as unfinished as that felt and as much as I look forward to the next time we can continue, so much has changed in even those years.  Now we’ve got Apps.  We’ve got hipstamatic and instagram now and tumblr.   Overheard quote on facebook, “I’ve seen people using instagram photos as album covers.  I mean, really?”  What I gather from this kind of disparaging remark is not only an aesthetic impropriety, but one of etiquette, too.  Where’s the Work, the Effort, the Beef?  I was napping and daydreaming about how to write about the image attached with this post and I thought was that the ubiquity, the accessibility of digital imagery (photographs) within social media is like trying to lick a roll-on lip gloss like a lollipop expecting to get to the center of a tootsie roll.  (I’m not sorry if you don’t get that reference.  Like the new Muppets movie, this is for us.)  It won’t work. It’s not the same thing.  The same thing as what one might ask–film?  Hmm.  Maybe. Print?  Is it the smell of fixer on my fingers I’m missing?  Not really, but I do think it has to do with the tactile quality of light on film and light on paper.  You can only grab it and run if you want to steal it.  It has weight.

So the other thing is that I’ve been hitting up some Pacific Standard Time shows and what I’ve been struck with  how much I miss black and white photographs.  It might of been initiated by my own work, really, the Bike It show of 16 x 20 prints which proved themselves to be the size the 4×5’s wanted to be all along.  It made me happy to see the portraits with such gradation and detail even though they were digital prints.  However, I was more fully struck with the craving and almost lust I felt when coming across photographs these past months around town.  Lionel Feninger for one and the Wallace Berman/Robert Heinecken show for another.  As I walked around these shows I could taste and feel the images, the paper, the human hand making adjustments of aperature, shutter or even glue. I wanted to look and look.  I understood and appreciated the signs stating “No pictures please.”  To me, the subtext was “By snapping a picture and uploading it to your tumblr, you are not making it your work.  You can’t have it.  Beat it.  Go home and make your own.”

I think there’s so much more I have to say about this, but I’ve got the blog blues and want to get to the image above.

And what of the image attached to this post, the instigator for this writing? Well, I was at my friend JP’s fortieth birthday party and while she was in the middle of opening presents with a posse of young children admirers and friends at her feet, I got distracted by the streamers hanging above.  They looked so festive in the early evening light, so I took out my telephone and snapped a photo.  Even without the flash the “camera” did this crazy thing with the colors.  Basically, it flattened them into pixels of a more vibrant hue and made a photograph of the streamers a graphic. I tried with and without the flash and the only thing that would work was to add the room, which I didn’t want in the frame. I know this is what a digital camera is doing, generating pixels of representation.  The problem in my mind is that in this instance with these streamers it’s SO OFF.  The colors are not the right shade, there’s no depth, no detail, no ability to discern. I find this both shocking and fascinating.  I know film can do this, too–I did a series of nightime photographs of houses in the neighborhood where I lived and some of the color photos did strange things, but there was an undeniable living quality even if surreal.  With these damn streamers (which I do indeed think are quite lovely) they just look computer generated. Fake. Phony. Unreal. Flat. The rub is I had no control.  Afterall, it was a picture taken by a telephone.

I did not alter the photographs at all from camera to computer, other than laying them out in illustrator as a way to playfully display multiple pictures.  I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.