365 Project Photos

So, regular readers will perhaps have noticed that we're quieter than usual around here. For my part, writing has been low on the list of ways I feel capable of expending my creative energy. Which is really pretty ungood for me, but there you have it. In the absence of writing, I've committed to a 365 self portrait project for the year, which...well, let's just say there may actually be well over 365 photos by the end of the year, but it won't be because I'm diligently taking one photo a day every day. No, not so much.

Which leads me to some genuinely interesting questions about why I'm doing a year-long project, what I want from it, how I want to (gasp!) improve my technical knowledge and execution, why self portraits in particular, how much can you do with self portraits, etc. Which will all maybe encourage me to sit and write at some point, which is a cheerful thought. But for now, I thought I'd take on at least a little bit of the bloggie responsibility around here and share some of the photos I've done so far this month, the ones I'm most excited about.  xoxo

Notebooks

(This essay is old, but I was thinking about it recently when I read Alice's post here, and then I found the pendant and used it for photo experimentation. [And I have to say, the photos are at least a whole lot better than they used to be!])



On the sofa next to me are no fewer than four journals of various sizes, all partially filled. There are also two sketch books (one large, one small), and a large pad of silky, sturdy graph paper that I like to use for taking notes and making lists and for sketching. In addition to the notebook pages that have been written or drawn on, each of these books has its own collection of scrap paper shoved into it, not quite fitting, getting worn and ripped around the edges that stick out.

I was looking for a list of words I’d written down at some point, thinking that I wanted to use them as the basis for a writing exercise. I scribbled them on one page or another, somewhere toward the back of a journal, or so I thought. But I currently have no idea where they are—I can’t find them in any of these books, and I can’t think of any other notebooks I’ve been schlepping around with me over the past year and a half. (I mean really, isn’t seven enough?) The rest of my notebook collection is neatly packed away in a box, historical documents now. But I came across my inspired word list just recently, so surely it’s in one of these living, breathing, and extremely disorganized books.

But if I can’t find the list, I have at least gotten a chance to look over a portrait of my brain as it really seems to work on a day-to-day basis, and I have to say, it’s a little distressing. For one thing, my journal writing has been less than regular of late. I know that my writing is better when I keep a more regular journal—and by “better” I mean that honest-to-God non-journal pieces of writing happen more often.

On the other hand, it seems that I never stop taking notes of one kind or another, even when the goal isn’t anything you could call “writing.” Example: My life is absolutely littered with tiny bits of paper covered in ideas about food. “Steamed carrots with vinaigrette/dill/etc.” says one. Another: “Greek style ‘yogurt’ with almonds and honey.” And then there’s simply: “coffee and chocolate frappé thingy.” The same page contains notes like, “get soldering stuff working,” and the somewhat cryptic-unless-you-live-in-my-head, “etsy!”

Other pages list the measurements of various beloved children for whom I’ve made clothing or plan to do so. Lists of spices my acupuncturist wants me to incorporate into my diet. Over-ambitious to-do lists that, I note, are in most cases still not completed. Almost dictatorial lists of life goals: “Learn to play the guitar/Make more of my own clothes/write more/learn to balance creative endeavors.”

The sketch books are just as overwhelming, with drawings for pieces of jewelry or clothing I want to make, various designs I’d like to turn into texture stamps for jewelry, not to mention all the things that aren’t sketches (more lists of food, more to-do lists, and the occasional more-to-the-point notes on soldering, polishing, forming a bezel, etc.).

So these notebooks are a mess, and I’m not sure what to think about that. My lack of focused writing frustrates me, and it’s super annoying not to know where things are when you want to find them again. I like to think I’d prefer to have one journal and one sketchbook and fill all the pages before jumping to new books. I’d like to keep my writing and sketching segregated from my to-do listing and recipe imagining. Surely I’d be way more productive if I had a place for everything and if everything were in its place.

And yet, just now I found a year-old sketch I wouldn’t have said I was thinking much about—it’s for a small, roughly drawn landscape pendant, with a tree in the bottom left corner, a hill behind it, and a moon in the top right corner. I hadn’t looked at it in months. But as it turns out, I took almost that exact pendant out of my kiln just yesterday:

I can’t consciously remember the words on that lost list, but maybe someday soon I’ll write something with them anyway.

Small Stones Blogroll Update

Alright, Small Stones participants. As it turns out, I'll be putting together the blogroll for the whole event--not just a little blogroll here at HAMAMA (though, maybe I'll do that as well? we shall see...) The blogroll for the entire event can be found at the Writing Our Way Home blog.

If you're planning to participate by writing small stones on your blog during January (either on your regular blog or one that you create specially for this project) and you'd like to be added to the blogroll, please send me a brief email with your URL at this address: halfassedmama@gmail.com

Thanks, and happy noticing and writing!

More Self Portraits

Last night, prompted by a conversation with a friend about her daughter's Halloween makeup, I felt a sudden need to draw all over my face with eyeliner. I've been thinking for some time about taking self portraits that incorporate some sort of fantastical makeup design, but somehow I never bothered. Because apparently, I was waiting for a really convenient time--like 10:00 at night on a night when I'd had the flu for several days prior. When I had to be up early to go get a U-Haul van so that I could move furniture into my new home. (About which, more later, once it's safely through the "worse before it gets better" stage of moving in chaos. The one in which cardboard features heavily as a decorative device.)

And then, although I hadn't exactly planned to take pictures last night, once I had all that makeup drawn on me, I couldn't very well waste the opportunity.

So here you go, in keeping with my new (but apparently ongoing) obsession with ethereal, fairy-like characters and candlelight in my self portraits. (I have no explanation, really. I was not particularly an ethereal, glitter-and-fairies sort of child. I'd love to think these current ethereal fairy-like creatures have a certain Shakespearean forest creep factor, but it's entirely possible they're just glittery. But whatever. They keep presenting themselves. I think I've decided my job with creative obsessions is simply to play them out to their natural finishing points.)

The last one is hands-down my favorite. I think I now also have an obsession with editing my photos to look like paintings. Yum.

The texture I used on this one can be found here. Honestly,
I wasn't really that into textures until I found this guy's
textures. They're really saturated and painterly and beautiful.

A Small Confession and a Care Package

The confession is that I never did manage to see the small boy this week, and therefore, I finally just took it upon myself to choose a name for our little blog-o-versary game.

(Don't worry though--I adhered to the highest ethical and technical standards in making my choice.)

(Well, okay. The highest ethical standards.)

And the winner is...Gisele! With whom I've been in touch already. But thank you to all of you who left us comment love! What a lovely group of people this blog has helped to gather around us this year--it's so nice to know you're out there reading.

Off to make a care package! (Not really. Off to get some work done. But soon! Soon, we will make a care package.)

Playing with Texture

Layering photos on photos (Swan Dive assignment of the week):

Spiderweb texture (old, dusty spiderweb that was
filled with cool bits of dried flowers and dead things)

This texture is a small bit of a beautiful painting my
friend Kathryn made for my birthday one year. This
doesn't show off the painting in any way, of course--
it's a gorgeous fall tree in many shades of orange--
but it sure did provide good color and texture
to layer on a photo.

A section of wrinkled bed sheet

Another self portrait

My fave: This texture is actually a photograph of rust.

Night Lights

Part of the point of Vivienne's latest class is for us to play with post-processing options. Part of the point for me personally is 1) to try actually using the manual settings on my camera (revolutionary, no?), and 2) to push myself to do some things that go beyond...realistic self portraits? Maybe that's a good way to describe what I'm after? Something that tells more of a composed story? I'm not sure--maybe I should just call them photographic lyrical fragments. In any case, there's nothing like killing multiple birds with one stone. So to speak. (Really, what a horrible expression--isn't there a less vile way to say that?)

Also, I now have a whole lot of Mason jar lanterns in my possession, which can only be to the good.

(As always, you can click on these to enlarge them.)

The Post With Way Too Many Links to (Other People's) Self Portraits

(But the links! They're mostly to pretty pictures!)

I'm planning to take another photography class with the lovely Vivienne McMaster in September. This one isn't specifically focused on self portraits, though she did kind of design it for folks who have taken one or both of her self portrait classes. (And in the event that you somehow missed my obsessive rambling about self portraits earlier in the year, see here and here.)

In any event, I'm still a little obsessed with self portraits. It's a rich genre, as you can see by looking here and here. So with a burst of creative energy I had this evening (finally, finally), I began compiling my ideas in a notebook and also searching Flickr to see what other people are doing with their self portraits. And I learned a few things.

1) Photoshop can be used for good...or for eeeeevil. Wowza. So, so bad.

2) You can take a picture of yourself in a landscape. Or, you can find a way to become an integral part of the landscape in your picture. Guess which one works better.

3) I am all for exploring the body through photography. There are some beautiful examples of this on Flickr--and interestingly, not all of them involve taking off one's clothes (also, looking like a Martha Graham dancer is generally a pretty okay idea in my book). However. There are also an alarming number of people who seem to think that taking off one's clothes in front of the camera automatically makes for a compelling photograph. As it turns out: Not so!

4) I like a nice concept, a story, a bit of mystery. I like a photo shoot that takes some thought and planning. I like props, costumes, landscapes to play in. (This sort of makes sense; I did once have something that vaguely resembled a career in theater.)

5) Mostly? People should probably stop trying to explain the meaning of their photos. Because wow, so many of the explanations are so not good--often, even when the photographs are pretty good! And in general, in art, it's just not a great plan to tell your audience what they should think about the thing you've created. Unless there's a really important reason for commentary, or the commentary is about something process oriented, let the photographs stand by themselves. And if they can't, well...that might indicate a problem.

And here--for being such good sports and clicking all those links (you know, I'm assuming), and because Lis seems to like it when I post my self portraits, and because I somehow feel a little weird when I post words without any pictures, here's a photograph I took in one of Vivienne's classes. I'm pretty sure that a year ago, when Lis and I started this blog, I'd never have posted any self portraits, let alone this one. Art, man. It changes you.

•backlog•

Generally, most of my projects fall by the wayside. Unless, of course, they come into their own. Hard and fast and on-top-of-one-another. I like it that way. (And that, says a small voice, is your downfall.)

Read more »

More (Oh, So Many More) Thoughts on Self Portraits

Do you all remember just about two weeks ago, when I wrote something about how I've always hated pictures of myself, and I'd kind of like to get over it already?

(Click on any of the images to expand them)

Yeah. I think I'm officially over it, and the class still has another week and a half to go. I also think I'll sign up for the next one.

I promised to write more about all the things this class is making me think, and although I'm still not ready to turn this into some polished essay on the subject, I really kind of want to write about it. And this is my blog. So this doesn't need to be a polished essay. (I know, I'm all about the revelations.)

So here, in no particular order, is an unpolished and random collection of thoughts on self portraiture. More or less just as the ideas gathered themselves in my journal over the last couple of weeks. And it's long. Really long. (You've been warned.) But there are pictures! And my grammar's not half bad, I promise!

1) I keep thinking about the words "image" and "imagine." The pictures I'm taking are often hitting me with incredible force--and it isn't about what I look like necessarily, but more about something behind the image. I wrote more or less the following in a comment on Vivienne's blog yesterday: As I look at the pictures, I'm having these visions of what I might be capable of, things that have nothing to do with my physical appearance, or with taking pictures (of myself or anything else). And the visions aren't anything I'm consciously calling to me--they're just these overwhelming feelings of creative possibility that stem from the pictures themselves. Amazing.

It keeps occurring to me that "imagine" is a more powerful verb than we give it credit for. Even when we're deeply committed to acts of creativity, I think we don't often hear the literal meaning the word "imagine" carries: That a mere image can call reality into being.

Jump!

2) If all of that is true--that an image can expand our ways of imagining ourselves--what else can it help us to imagine? How can portraits of ourselves and other people stretch our creativity and help us to stop putting limits on ourselves and everyone else?

3) And really, isn't that just another way of asking how really seeing ourselves and other people can allow us to expand our visions of them/ourselves?

4) And on that subject, I'm blown away by the degree to which self portraits allow us to allow ourselves to be seen. There are so many elements to just this issue. One of them, it's been occurring to me, is that when we're the ones both in front of and behind the camera, we have all the power and control. We can tell the story we need to tell about ourselves.

I'm not entirely comfortable with this, actually--this "being seen" business. And it's also the thing I am probably most desperate for in the world. And suddenly, this class is helping me develop the power to say, "Here I am. This is who I really am." It makes me a little squirmy to post these pictures here, but I'm also pretty proud of them. Not necessarily as photographs (still know nothing about my camera! but it's a blissful ignorance!), but as images that tell a bit of my story.

I'm interested in how this differs for me from sharing my writing with the world--after all, writing too is a way of saying, "This is who I am." I think partly it's different because I've been writing for much longer than I've been taking pictures of myself, and partly because writing is so easily separated from my physical self. A portrait is about much, much more than my physical self, but it's intimately, inextricably entwined with that physicality as well, and that's a new level of vulnerability for me.

(And wow, do those last few paragraphs shed some light for me on my fascination with/loathing of/terror of performing. Topic for another day entirely. Welcome to my stream of consciousness.)

5) Which leads me to the concept of "bad" pictures of ourselves. I think my dislike of most pictures of myself has very much stemmed from feeling unseen--and by unseen I mean, not seen for who I am, not appearing visually in a way that meshes with who I feel like I am on the inside. And that's pretty much my definition of feeling ugly.

6) Which leads me to something else I keep thinking, as I look through the hundreds of photos taken by my lovely classmates: If you don't find someone beautiful in some way, you aren't really looking at them. Look harder. With the exception of the average axe murderer, everyone is beautiful. Everyone. Yup, you too.

7) And also: Once you start accumulating pictures that make you feel seen, all the pictures you thought you hated might start to look very different to you. I had occasion to look through some very old pictures of myself just in the last two weeks, during this class, and it was as if I'd never seen them before. As if every instrument I'd ever used to measure them had been recalibrated. Sure, some of them are bad pictures--but that's all they are. They don't reflect who I am--they're just lousy snapshots. And that's different. And it's not a big deal when I'm feeling seen in other pictures.

8) Let's take a look at the word snapshot for a moment. I happen to like it, and the momentary, fleeting, time-bound nature it implies. For the same reasons, I really like the word "capture," despite the fact that it seems to get flung about willy-nilly on the Internet. (Was "capture"--used as a noun--a real photography term pre-Internet-digitized-Flickr photography?) Anyway--it's fitting, I think. It's occurring to me, as I snap picture after picture after picture--in mere seconds, with no space in between them, just trying to keep myself moving the entire time--that a photograph is simply a freeze frame.

Later, after I download the pictures, I can "flip" through them on my computer, zipping from one to another very fast--like a flip book or an old movie reel--and I can start to sense how I move. How that richer, more nuanced, more fluid whole might be beautiful, even if the freeze frames just aren't working on any given day. (And I'm not an Ani Difranco fan, but I have to admit the final lyrics to her song "Evolve" apply beautifully here: "It took me too long to realize / that I don't take good pictures / 'cause I have the kind of beauty / that moves.")

Me, magically making my hair...float?

9) However! I'm beginning to think I would argue that everyone can "take good pictures." Everyone has the kind of beauty that moves, I think, and everyone's beauty can be captured in those freeze frame moments if they/someone tries hard enough, sees them clearly enough. And as I said before, I'm learning that it takes a lot of pictures to get a few good ones. Can I just say that again? A LOT of pictures. Oh! And movement in the moment when you're actually taking the pictures is so important. It keeps you loose, natural, comfortable, and it gives the camera some of that moving beauty to sink its teeth into.

Me, not moving, just exhausted from
taking too many damn pictures.

10) The other thing about taking so many pictures, aside from starting to see how they fit together to make movement, is that they show facets. Whenever I see a lot of different photos of someone, taken over time, I'm often amazed at how different they look in each picture, and at the same time, how recognizable they become over the course of many pictures. I'm noticing that I look vastly different to myself in all my different pictures--though, taken all together, they're clearly making an overarching, collective portrait of me. The pictures represent all these facets of me--different moods, expressions, mannerisms. Things people who see me all the time in real life probably recognize unthinkingly, but I had no idea I consisted of so many tiny moments making up a whole.

11) Some of the activities for this class have sent us out into the world to take pictures. And that's super fun. And also somewhat challenging, because--as you might imagine--people look at you funny when you're jumping around, snapping pictures of yourself and making funny faces at the camera. This is...daunting. And also, once you figure out a way to deal with it, kind of funny and fun. One woman in the class told us that she was simply telling people "I'm doing a project for a class." This, I love. This, I will use--now, during the class, and forevermore. Think of all the deviant behavior that can be excused this way!

(In fact, it makes me think of a fantastic sociology professor at my college, who used to teach a notorious-on-campus Sociology of Deviance class, during the course of which, students were sent out into the world to behave in some deviant manner of their choosing and then to note the world's reactions. Of course, students in that class weren't permitted to make excuses for their behavior. But I wonder if anyone ever thought of taking a quadrillion self portraits, say, on the train from Bryn Mawr to Center City Philadelphia?)

Anyway, whatever excuse you use, you quickly learn that you need to have one. And you still wind up feeling a little inhibited and ridiculous, even once you kind of find it funny to have people giving you weird looks.

And--here's a shock--my pictures from the days when I've felt more inhibited are not even close to as good as the ones from other days. They're not even remotely as open and free and really me as the others. And how fascinating that the presence of other people can so deeply affect how easily we allow ourselves to be ourselves. And how interesting that when we can honestly stop worrying about how people are seeing us, we're so much more able to offer them the opportunity to see us for who we really are.

In conclusion: Take Vivienne's class if you have the chance and the inclination. But even if you don't do that, go take some pictures of yourself. A lot of pictures of yourself. And see if it doesn't change you a little bit.

Image

I'm learning a lot in the self portraiture class I'm taking, most of which I can't even put into words yet. But on the very simplest level, in only five days, something fundamental has shifted in the way I think about who I am physically in the world. It turns out, once you have even a small handful of pictures you really, really love, all the terrible pictures in the world are totally inconsequential (except possibly for their amusement value, which you can finally appreciate once you feel like they might not actually represent some concrete version of reality).

There's a lot of more important stuff turning up too--about the ways self-image plays into the possibilities we imagine for ourselves, and how the one-dimensional images of beauty we're fed might be holding us all back more than we know. In ways that are the furthest thing from shallow or self-indulgent: Like, the ways that limiting our images of what constitutes physical beauty might limit our imaginations in general. But as I said, I'm not sure I'm ready to tackle writing or talking about those deeper levels yet, so I trust you'll understand if all of that is somewhat incoherent.

Anyway, it's also incredibly inspiring to see the self-portraits of a large group of people, every one of whom is gorgeous. It's inspiring to see all the different ways that people are gorgeous. Seriously, if you hate every picture you have of yourself, I can't recommend highly enough that you take this class at some point. Really. Do the work--which is actually heavy-duty play--and it will change your ideas about what you look like. Quickly.

The biggest technical points I've realized this week are actually stupidly obvious: The more pictures you take (and this week, I've taken literally hundreds), and the faster you take them, and the less you think about them, the greater the chance that at least a few of them will be entirely kick-ass.

Wading In

Because the River of Stones project was just not enough creative activity for this month, I decided (on the spur of the moment yesterday, the last day to sign up) to take a class on self portraits. Partly as a way to exercise my new camera, and partly because I usually *hate* pictures of myself, and I'd kinda like to get over it already.

And I'll be darned if I didn't get a picture I don't hate, right on day one.