Five Fotos: Week Uno

I want to integrate my photography a lot more with my writing, starting with a five foto's of the week (that will likely happen once a month). The point is to showcase my favorite shots of the week, no matter what comes out. Anyway, here's the start.

To A New Place

Canon AE-1 35mm Kodak Plus-x Pan Film - Arizona

• Onward, to adventure and self-discovery.
• Self-developed, under-developed and turned all the film red.

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Unloading Bay

Canon AE-1 35mm film - Arizona

• Trash dumped behind abandoned Wal-Mart. Returning shit to whence it came.

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Crushed

Kodak Disposable Camera, 35mm film - Flagstaff

• Bored ice cream parlor with lazily stocked shelves, products designed to catch the eye, begging to be picked up. Muting the colors and downplaying that gimmick, as if the slogan is now "Empty Feelings Inside!®"

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Borrowed Gift

Pentax K-1000 35mm film, green filter - Flagstaff

•Such a grand tree, borrowed camera and filter.

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Story of the Eye

Pentax K-1000 35mm film, zero flash - Bathroom

• Eggs in a toilet. Recreated scene from "The Story of the Eye" by Georges Bataille, but definitely NOT for the same reasons as the author.
• Eggs were hard to flush and I had to crush them with a plunger to get them down. In retrospect, not a good idea at all. They probably started to smell, but luckily I moved out the next day.





[Insert something conclusive]

Picture Book - This is it!

My girlfriend and I are going to make a book together. It's going to be pictures of ours taken of decay in America. Gean is designing it, mostly. Sweet Urban Decay is the title.

It should be done by January or February. I want to be able to collect some more images during my time over winter break.

Cost will be about $30 per book. You may be able to buy it off the website we're using cheaper, but I don't know how to work that yet. We'll see.

Images will be like the pictured example, the fringes of society and the act of decomposition. It will be full color 7inches by 7 inches and nice and full of pretty pictures you can get for free on my flickr. Knowing that, who would be willing to buy a copy? FYI the cost is not to make tons of money, it's just to cover the cost of printing and developing film and stuff. Any extra cash would go towards making more art, not cigarettes or any of that. Honest.

So are you willing to buy this book that I am publishing myself? Self-publication runs the risk of not being able to sell the book, so I was going to only order ten books (about $300.00) but that would put me in a lot of debt. It would help if you would pre-order it. Especially in this economy.

So this is it. And that's it.

Day Twenty Four: Love Keeps

Got my photos back, the expired film ones. They didn't turn out as exciting as I imagined, but some of them did become really surreal and cool.

The one at the top I chose because, look at that sky. Look at the house and how creepy it looks, yet the colors aren't dark. It may look realistic, but this photo is very, very fake and not on purpose. It tried to be real.

The house has been there as long as I can remember. It used to belong to a woman named Connie Strand who tried to turn her house into a community center, but no one supported her idea. She lost half a million dollars and her house was taken by the bank.

When I was ten, my father was reading Ayn Rand. He explained the arguments to me, and for the most part, I agreed with them. I asked my dad if I could read the books, and he said to wait until I was 18. When my friend Aaron gave me a copy of Anthem in May, I knew it couldn't have been better timing. Exactly eight years ago, I'm fulfilling my own prophecies.

But I can't read it. I can't get past the first five pages. It tortures me. I like fiction about dystopia, sure, but I can't stand the type where individuality is crushed. I hated the Giver and I couldn't start 1984 for the same reason. But I adore V for Vendetta and similar stories, where individuality is not, and cannot be sacrificed.

Part of the reason is I already feel like we exist under a totalitarian regime. I mean, the U.S. government is the most powerful and expensive government in history. It's bigger than the Nazis and it's bigger than the USSR. We spy on our citizens and have concentration camps and we build walls just like they did. How is this different? Oh yeah, we're the good guys.

So I did not and will not completely fulfill my goal, but I learned some things about myself in the process, so all is well. I've been reading poetic, sad, fantastic surrealism and my heart is at peace.

I read an entire archive of arguments between a young man and his girlfriend. It's one sided, so whether she is a bitch or not, the guy's faults are a footnote. My first thought was, I totally understand. Wasn't one or two of my ex's exactly like that? My second thought was, Love keeps no record of wrongs.

One step forward. . .

I've been dreaming, about stupid things. Anyone I respect would think I was making a mistake. I wonder if they can appreciate the beauty in a dream, even one I don't plan on acting on. There's two. The first, is I want to buy a car and drive back to Phoenix. It's about 3,000 miles and would cost a fortune and it would take forever and people already miss me, so it probably won't happen. I'll take that return ticket home. But can't you imagine?

The other, I told to enough people and I don't feel like sharing anymore.

Day Twenty Two: ShowKase

For two months, I gave up smoking because I didn't want to be sneaking puffs around my family. Plus, it's healthy. Today, I had my first craving. Maybe it wasn't a craving really. It was, "If I don't have a cigarette, I may become upset. Plus, I'd really enjoy it." But I just went on with life and it went away.

I also thought I gave up creating anything, other than writing. But maybe it's been creating me. The reason for this strange abstinence is, I wouldn't have enough room in my suitcase to return. So now I'm gonna mail crap off. Like an entire box of LP records.

So a profile, on the art I've been doing. Why not? Nothing else happened today.

I already mentioned I wanted to experiment with the expired film I found. It is supposed to have some amazing results, really weird and creepy stuff. Examples here. However, I did some research online and discovered that in order to get the prints I desire the film should be a couple decades old. Preferably. It all depends on how the film was stored and the film I acquired was probably stored well. It's too young. I will develop some film this week and we'll see. I heated the canister up, holding it over a toaster. Maybe that will work.

I take photos like I write. I see everything, record everything but share very little. I have thousands on my computer, but only uploaded a couple hundred to Flickr. So, I have finally finished an old series I call "TOiLET" where I placed inspirational messages on clogged or unflushed toilets. They said things like "You Could Win!" or "Please Try Again!", as if it were a contest to treat toilets with respect.

The pun is, TO LET. This set deals with how we treat an important fixture in everyday life. We leave it unflushed or we make jokes about it or we clog it. We ignore it. We give too much or too little respect to it. There is an I in toilet. That isn't emphasized.

Clogging a toilet, essentially vandalizing the whole bathroom, was what got me expelled from my high school. It was one of the best decisions in my life. I also showcase toilets I've vandalized since or gross ones I've discovered.

Maybe I will make some large prints of these. I dunno yet. You can see some more here.

I was rummaging in the basement today and I found a toy doll. I decided to take a picture of it next to the candles, because I wanted to imitate Snailbooty's amazing, weird still lifes. I placed it upside down in a candle holder. I like how it made a helmet. My example was a little too hurried.

Also, I've been way more eager to take photos of sweet urban decay ever since I found the Urban Decay Colr Picker. So I took a lot. Expect more sad little shots of that kind of junk.

This is the current inspiration I'm feeling. Tomorrow I'm going to Boston. It will probably be refreshing, mentally, physically, spiritually.