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

Blur

Self portraits taken today for Rewriting the Story. The assignment was to play with blur and focus--blurring things that might normally be your focus, focusing on things that wouldn't. I was a little stumped about how to control the focus while using a remote (which automatically focuses the camera). I could have set the focus manually and then set the self timer, but really--ten seconds to clamber around too many branches or climb past brambles to perch on a fallen tree? In a delicate, filmy dress? Yeah, not happening. So I messed around with making things "blurry" in one way or another during editing.

The blur interests me on levels I have no energy to delve into right now. I've been sick the past couple of days, and I have other posts stewing in my brain, but I can't write those now either. (It's amazing I managed to get any photos done.) But sometimes, I just like to come here and check in. Or reach out. Make a mark somehow.

Starry, Starry...Well, Everything, Just Now...

This week in Swan Dive, we've been creating texture photos to use for layering. Below is a texture I painted last fall (when I took the class for the first time). It's sort of texturally interesting, but so far I've found that it's not entirely well suited to my photos.



A bit of playing around with it in PicMonkey and Pixlr Express, however, and I got this:



Specifically, I softened and intensified the original a bit (using the Orton effect in PicMonkey), then I took it over to Pixlr and layered on one of their star overlays two times at full strength. And now I can't stop layering it over my photos. For example:



Or this, originally seen edited completely differently here:

Fairy Tale Photo Edits for Today

All played with, as that's my M.O. for this month.

I often have mixed feelings about doing this to photos--it's really fun to do, and I can get really into the experimentation. But I'm not always sure I like the results. The beauty of being able to play with them like this? The two below weren't very good photos to begin with, and now they're at least interesting to look at--see the before and after.

Before: Booooring

After. "Who's that trip-trapping across my bridge?"
All edits and textures from PicMonkey and Pixlr Express

Before

After--texture can be found here

So...definitely more interesting than the originals. Definitely a lot of fun to make. But they're not really anything more than pretty, you know? Not that there's anything wrong with pretty, but apparently I have a complicated relationship with making things that are just pretty.

But I don't always feel this way about editing heavily. Sometimes, it's precisely, exactly what a photo needs to become precisely, exactly what it's meant to become. Below, for instance, is my favorite self portrait so far. In altering the image's texture and color, I turned it into something that has less to do with what I look like, and more to do with being...I'm not really sure how to put it. But it became something outside of myself, something that has a deeper story, and something I hope is more than merely pretty. And I love that.

Also interesting--the texture on the self portrait is the very same texture I used on the orchard photo above. It works well on both, but it's astonishing how vastly different the total effect is, no?

Sunday Drive

I got in my car this afternoon with my camera and no particular plan except to get a cup of coffee and go somewhere beautiful to take some pictures for class. So, coffee in hand, I took off toward those hills I love, thinking I'd probably wind up at Cold Canyon to walk along the creek for a while. But once I got to the turnout where everyone parks to access the hiking trails, it was completely packed with cars.

So I just kept driving--up around Monticello Dam, where Lake Berryessa begins, and really into the hills. And when the road split into 128 and 121, I took 128 toward Napa. I've known for a long time that you can get to Napa that way, of course, but I've never driven the route--I thought it would take a lot longer than it actually does. Frankly, it can't be much more than half an hour longer than taking the highway, and it's about a thousand times more beautiful. I stopped a lot to take pictures.

(Photos are clickable for enlargification-type purposes.)

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.

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.

Trust Roots

Is it better for grief to be paired with hope? Or is it best to have none, to hit the bottom hard and in your pain know, at least, that there’s no further down to go? Hope can always fail us eventually: What if the thing hoped for never comes to pass? What if the universe is moving in a different direction than the one you’re longing for? And so grief paired with hope is a perfect breeding ground for fear.

And still, I think I’ll take my grief with hope and do my best to wait, as Adrienne Rich says, "...without sadness and with grave impatience." And to believe that roots lovingly tended can survive a winter under snow and send up green shoots in the spring--whenever spring arrives.

(From "This is My Third and Last Address to You," by Adrienne Rich)

The work of winter starts fermenting in my head
how with the hands of a lover or a midwife
to hold back till the time is right

force nothing, be unforced
accept no giant miracles of growth
by counterfeit light

trust roots, allow the days to shrink
give credence to these slender means
wait without sadness and with grave impatience

here in the north where winter has a meaning
where the heaped colors suddenly go ashen
where nothing is promised

learn what an underground journey
has been, might have to be; speak in a winter code
let fog, sleet, translate; wind, carry them.

Puzzle Pieces

The best pieces are the ones you don’t expect. Pieces lost, maybe, in the spirit world before birth, or saved by the gods as surprise gifts, meant to be found bit by bit as you go along your way. Maybe you only see them when you’ve grown enough to do so, when you can see how well they fit you.

But you still love the other pieces, they still evoke tenderness and longing in you. They gave you shape, after all, when all you had of “something more” was faith that it must exist.

This is about beauty, and completion (maybe), and feeling whole.

This is about landscape. Maybe:

The scent of eucalyptus and coastal sage, and the way the fog blows in from the ocean to cloak the hills; the way the wind shapes the Monterey cypresses like a giant bonsai master.

But you still love the lushness of the other pieces, the way a mountain is automatically something covered with trees, the way rain drips off branches on old city streets. The way you smell rain coming.

But the pieces are all yours; it’s not about choosing.

Maybe it’s about being brave enough to change the shape of things, when it means losing an already beautiful contour.

And maybe there’s nothing outside of the puzzle—no loss, none of the completion you imagined, nothing other than loving the pieces you love and constantly being brave enough to shift them around. The picture was so pretty, but everything breaks or changes. The moment you think you can see just how it’s supposed to look, another of your pieces turns up, and your landscape rotates with the earth on its axis, and you’re dazzled all over again.

Voices

The self portrait class. Will I ever post about anything else? Are you bored yet? Well, I'm not, and this here's my blog! (Well, and Lis's blog too, of course...Lis, are you bored yet?)

I'm kind of joking. But kind of obsessed! These classes are just pushing my thinking buttons so hard. And that's nice. I like a well-engaged thinking button.

ANYWAY. The work for this week (and for life as an artist, no?) is to start thinking about our visual voices. Visual voice. It turns out, I have one. What I can see so far is that, in part, it has kind of a dreamy, Romantic, nature vibe to it. Which, when I think about my jewelry designs, doesn't seem that odd. (It also has a goofy vibe, which also is not surprising.)

One of my classmates is a novelist, and she and I started a casual sort of exchange about how/whether our visual voices line up with our writing voices. I think my voices line up pretty directly in some ways, and inspired by Johanna's self portraits, which often incorporate words, I decided to play with a photo I would have written off, except that it made a perfect backdrop for a prose poem (or lyrical fragment, as I generally prefer to call them) I wrote a while back. I had several people in mind when I wrote this, but mostly, it was for my dad. And now I realize it makes a pretty good note to self as well.

I don't love the technical execution of this photo/writing conglomeration. It still feels more conglomeratory than composed, but partly that's because editing photos on Picnik has some technical limitations (possibly operator-generated technical limitations, but still). Also, I do not love that this experiment resulted in line breaks--there was no getting around it, so I just tried to break the lines in ways that suggest they were not meant to be poetically chosen line breaks. The original piece is very much a block of text, and I much prefer that. Oh well. The goal here wasn't finalized, perfect art, anyway, but rather exploration and discovery. (If you can't read the words, you can click on the photo to enlarge it.)

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.