The Revival of Contemporary Photography

Photo of the day.

"Light falls..."

I've been on an odd type of trip lately when it comes to photography. And I've noticed a shift in my vision or rather a slight deepening of meaning that I'm seeking when it comes to the imagery I've been consuming and capturing. I've been observing a tremendous amount of documentaries about photography and photographers trying to understand where my own peculiar sort of artistic unrest is originating from. I suspect the angst has to do with a visual tiredness and unease at the overwhelming amount of imagery that seems to be in circulation at any given moment online. I'm pondering writing a series of essays on the rise of mass consumption and sharing and how it correlates to various trends in offline photography but the ideas are all still percolating.

The Revival of Contemporary Photography

A series that really, really touched me though is called Contacts. I devoured all of Contacts: Volume 2 - The Revival of Contemporary Photography and Contacts: Volume 3: Conceptual Photography over the course of two nights. It’s a collection of tiny vignettes that explore different photographer’s contact sheets and/or body of work while they explain or talk about their work. I think I've viewed the vignette of Sarah Moon’s work set to her stream-of-consciousness description of her own inward photographic journey over a dozen times at this point .When I first watched it and listened, I could barely stop the tears from flowing because it was absolutely perfect (and even that would be an understatement).

I had a completely various group of thoughts I wanted to include with my image of the Williamsburg Bridge (taken with the trusty Sony A99) but I seem to have veered in a different direction, perhaps because all of this has been on my mind for weeks. And that’s okay, now that I think of it, because in some ways, there couldn’t become an additional fitting recent image to accompany this post.

“Time goes by. Light falls. I lose confidence. I don’t desire to be a photographer anymore…

Then, all of a sudden, but not always, something changes, I can’t say why, maybe I’m simply in the right place at the right time, or maybe I believe in it.

However, for a divide 2nd, I see a sparkle of beauty passing by, everything goes so rapidly nowadays within that stillness, and I’m carried out, as well as past I love what I see, and I can’t avoid choosing it, then wasting it, and all day long I keep on, because it once existed.