WIP.CRACKER

Investment

Highway 395 vs Highway 5

I have driven to Southern California via the 5. It's hundreds of miles of four lane road (two in each direction). The scenery is heartland California - lots of farms and nothing else. It's a very practical straight shot. The traffic is always tightly packed groups of cars going 80, with ocassional teeth-gnashers filtering through the packs at 90 plus. It's totally annoying.

My more easterly route put me through Yosemite Valley. I live pretty close to Yosemite, but I'm not much of a camper so I haven't been before. I drove through it pointedly, but it's a beautiful area and I'd like to return to it someday, if only to dispell the minor guilt I feel at driving through it at such a high rate of speed.


I've shot landscapes from time to time and it's always been the same: I take the picture but when I look at it there's nothing there. On this trip I think something's finally starting to show up.

When I came out of Yosemite Valley this is what I saw:

That's Mono Lake. Anyways, back to fake race car driving. I got on Highway 395 for most of the way down south. In contrast to the 5, it's mostly one lane, it's totally out of the way of most everything, there are no packs and at least around me there was only one gnasher. On the 5, it seems like people are all competing and about to go nuts on each other. On the 395, it was super mellow. I would roll up behind somebody going like twice their speed, slow down and maintain a respectful-but-declaritive distance, and as soon as a passing lane appeared they'd move over. No trouble at all. And the nice thing about driving a car with some chutzpah is the passing takes place so quickly there's no stress.

I came down at night, which was pretty cool. The darkness removed everything the headlights could not see.

Recently, I made a solo getaway, a short trip built around two things: a fast car and desolation.

I have for as long as I have remembered, experienced the creative urge. I have spent most of my life ignoring, squashing, or running from the same. Yet I have also consistently dabbled in one form or creative expression or another: cartooning, writing, sculpting, painting, metalwork, interior design, urban planning. It's just that whenever my efforts in that form threatened to move from easy execution to difficult, I stopped.

Photography has stuck, or rather, I've devoted myself to it, drawn the line in the sand. So now, when it goes from easy to difficult, I don't stop, I just slow to a crawl.

My self-promotion machine is getting built, it's just really slowly. I assembled my portfolio images in May, and the physical book will likely be done in January. I initiated a logo redesign in March and it was finished in August. I did a magazine review to find targets about three months ago and have not revisited it. Yet.

Technically-speaking, the last year has seen a lot of improvement. A friend of mine told me I've spent the last year 'setting up still life problems and solving them'. I have really tightened up my techniques, and as well I have improved my gear.

Talking last night with my lovely and smart girlfriend, I was saying that it feels like I've moved further away from the conceptual side of things, which is what I truly love, in favor of the technical side, for which my love is a little fleeting. She said maybe what I really want to be is an art director, and it really touched something in me, stopped something.

But I don't want to change forms again. I lose too much each time I do. And after thinking about it, it seems that really good art directors are a little bit photographers, and really good photographers are a little bit art directors. Each needs to be able to communicate, anticipate, support, reach a common ground.

So I think I'll just keep on.