All flat now!

The straw hat

This morning I read a fairly interesting essay by Mark Greif on the Hipsters in The New York Time Sunday book review, dated 12/11/2010. I live in London and there are a lot of hipsters. In fact, since reading Greif's not so flat platitudes, it appears I use to be one; Mr Greif, referring to Pierre Bourdieu, establish that one type of hipster is "the middle class child who moves to large urban area to work in the creative field". So nicely and bluntly said. I think the hipster is the city guy who categorize the provincial youth in social type because they all wear the uniform of globalization whatever the trend of the year. close. Who cares about stereotype  anyway. We all know crystal-meth is not good for you.

I have done a bit of thinking today, about improvement and series. and the dream and  understanding what people want to see in acknowledging what I want to see. Then I decided it wasn't time on a tuesdayto fight with myself and left the house . The bitter cold helped me forget immediately about all the gibbering my hip-self come up with. Tonight I had me self a bit of fun. I haven't got a clue but I'm enjoying.

p.s: the plastic white chair was bought for a photo-shoot a few weeks ago. I have spent such a long time hating those god damn thing', I had to resolve the matter. Now, I'm stuck with the thing, I can feel the pressure building... it's wicked.

White on white translucent black capes

Post tittle from Bella Lugosi's dead by Bauhaus.

but where is everyone?

I like iPhoto, it is scarily easy, I just scroll up or down and pick and mix and it's tidy and mostly the good enough to be published pictures stand out from the mediocre more rapidly than in my head. There is no time wasted shifting through boxes of prints and then more boxes of negatives. I could never guaranty that my negatives would stay with their contact-shits. And I never need to find the magnifier again, a double click and I have a 14x11 in image in front of me. Still yesterday I felt hatred for all things digital, I just wanted to hold some prints, move them around, align a little story, look at some color pigments and not some brightly lit pixels. I can not remember the last time I got something printed. Now there is too much. My anger at the digital mainly came after looking at the result of a portrait session I did recently and being certain that the result would have been so much better if I had used one of the film camera. My world has become flat. I long for the depth, the richness of traditional prints, I want a black with detail, a highlight with detail, may be I don't want to scroll endlessly in Steve Jobs' deserted land. I know, no one is forcing me. I'm gonna start eating pasta every day again so that I can treat myself to a beautiful print.

watermelon

yesterday morning school run

the two eyed truth

Every day, I try to reconsider why I take photographs, which one are worth showing, which are best kept hidden for the time being and how much I care or not about the photographs belonging to a certain category or school or what degree of ripping off other people's work, inspiration, of being under the influence have possessed me while pressing the shutter ( thank god, so far cameras still have a shutter release even if THEY are trying to convince us that HD video  is the new photography... leave the shutter open for 5 hours you might get a good image out of it). I know, it is time consuming. It leave me no time to do something else. Sometimes, it leaves me no time to go out and take photographs. But I enjoy very much doing all this  r e c o n s i d e r a t i o n. I take it very seriously. It means, I have a tremendous knowledge of the history of photography and I have to be up to scratch with art history as well and sociology is important, so is general history and a certain amount of understanding of technology, optics and chemistry becoming things of the past but you never really forget what you learned at school. In order to reconsider, to consider objectively what I am recording, I have learned that the most important things are honesty and modesty and those two traits belongs to philosophy because they are entirely subjective. I genuinely enjoyed reading Roland Barthes and Regis Durand when I was young, it spoke to me even more so than Jack Kerouac,  Celine and Henri Miller all together; to this day, my bible is The New History of Photography by Michel Frizot. I am a photography swot; but when I shoot, I'm high on adrenaline and my entire body contract in the single effort of catching a fickle vision, my brain stop functioning under the pressure. I'm close to death. It will take my senses from an hour to many years to retrace the event. I was going to start talking about photography as a mean to step out from a situation, as in Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and probably William Eggleston and probably Juergen Teller and probably countless others including myself have saved their life by holding a camera in front of them but I do not like to brag about people I have never even met, so I'll go and make a cup of tea and start considering those shots of an 18 year old model I took on saturday.

The ones that did

Any length of string or ribbon would be saved. Any wrapping paper. All buttons and zippers would be removed from garments before the clothes became rags for cleaning, blocking, signaling if not turned into new garments such as children clothing or summer version of themselves. The lace works of shirts and underwear would be removed to be used again. The products of years of careful collecting will be thrown away. Colors and manufacture's quality of past clothing will be forgotten, unless miraculously inherited by a museum that will charge us the rate of half a day work to have the privilege of admiring what was once in our grand-mother chest of draws or in our great-grand-father garage.

The ones that didn't make it

Hampstead Heath

Du regard en reconnaissant