You are still an individual human being with a soul and a history, friends and relatives and coworkers who care about you, who can vouch for you: they recognize your face and your voice and your personality, and you are aware of your life as a continuous thread, a dependable unfolding story of yourself that you are telling to yourself, you wake up and feel fairly happy – happy in that bland, daily way that doesn’t even recognize itself as happiness, moving into the empty hours that probably won’t be anything more than a series of rote actions: showering and pouring coffee into a cup and dressing and turning a key in the ignitions and driving down streets that are so familiar you don’t even recall making certain turns and stops – though, yes, you are still present, your mind must have consciously carried out the procedure of braking at the corner and rolling the steering wheel beneath your palms and making a left onto the highway even though there is no memory at all of these actions. Perhaps if you were hypnotized such mundane moments could be retrieved, they are written on some file and stored, unused and useless in some neurological clerk’s back room. Does it matter? You are still you, after all, through all of these hours and days; you are still whole–
From Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
Cleveland was not in great shape. At first glance, it appeared that Cleveland was in the midst of its final death throes: infrastructure collapsing, stores closed and boarded up, Euclid Avenue-the great central street – dismantled, the asphalt torn and piled along the sidewalk, the left lane a muddy trench lined with orange construction barrels, the beautiful old buildings – May Company, Higbee’s – hollowed out, belts of empty lots and haunted-looking warehouses.
This had been ongoing for as long as he could remember – for years and years the city had been sliding into ruin and despair, people always spoke with nostalgia about the former glory of the city’s past, and he had never taken such talk particularly seriously.
But now it looked like a place that had been bombed and then abandoned. Driving downtown for the first time, he had an apocalyptic feeling, a last-man-on-earth feeling, even though other cars were driving a few blocks ahead, even though he saw a dark figure disappearing into the doorway of a ramshackle tavern. It was the feeling you got when you woke up and everyone you loved was dead. Everyone was dead, and yet the world was continuing on, austere and thoughtless, the sky stirred full with gulls and starlings. A blimp floated lethargically in the haze above the baseball field like an old balloon that had been discarded in a muddy lake.
From Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon (This book was amazing.)
I stumbled across this (click 2008 and then image of Vladimir Putin by Platon) interview with Platon about his photo shoot with Vladimir Putin and thought it was interesting. Also it reminded me of this behind the scenes video by Stephen Voss. I just really like the abrupt ending.
A while ago there was a Solve Sundsbo interview over at SHOWstudio that I recently revisited. Some items he said that struck a chord with me were:
“It kind of sounds weird but to actually stand behind a camera and having to communicate with someone is terrifying because you have to get either a performance out of someone or you have to kind of capture something that you think is essential about that person. And there are so many great photographers out there as well so you know what the standard is, you know how good it can be, and if you put your standards up to the level of whoever you admire it’s pretty terrifying.”
“If you want the level to be high I think you’ll be disappointed quite often. I don’t think it is something that you should be scared of to be disappointed, right. Cuz I think that if you just want to be happy all the time you won’t be very ambitious…. You’ll shoot really boring pictures very quickly.”
This was my first attempt at this project since leaving California and winding up in a city. I spent a lot of time wandering the streets looking for locations. It was a struggle to find a spot with the proper distance and interest. This work was definitely better suited for wide open spaces. As it was I was set up in a handicap parking space which I was able to shoot in until an elderly woman almost ran me down trying to park there.
