Day 19

What a difference a day can make. Yesterday I had the pleasure and privilege of going shooting with my friend Brigitte, one of my favorite mamas. She's also trying to re-claim photography into her life, having had a similar experience to mine (and of course to that many other creative women) wherein the essential generative work of mothering very young children crowds out so much else we used to enjoy with our higher minds: reading. Keeping up with current events. Showering.

So, we had a terrific time -- or at least I did, and Brigitte seemed to be enjoying herself too but was too busy framing images to keep exclaiming, "OMG this is so great! Isn't this fantastic?!" like I seemed unable keep myself from doing, oh every 90 seconds or so. We spent a couple of hours exploring a particularly apocalyptic corner of extreme southeastern Baltimore City known as Fairfield, where there are refineries and tank farms and even, as was strongly evident on the hot and aromatic breeze, a rendering plant. After an overcast day -- cloudy is fine with me, I took my Diana camera and flat light is usually best for what I like to do with toycamera pictures -- as the sun sank toward the horizon there was some really lovely, though often fugitive, evening light breaking from below the cloud cover. Light so nice it makes me want to break out the fancy adjectives: aureate. Pellucid. Then we went for sushi.

By the time shooting and dinner were done it was late and even though I was excited to review the iPhone shots I'd done I knew lacked the mental energy to edit my photos quickly or even well. But I've passed another pleasurable hour this morning looking through yesterday evening's take, and I'm really pretty happy with the one I settled on. Who knows why all four tires on a giant skid loader would have the word "freedom" scrawled on them...but I've recently been very intrigued with "found" language, words appearing in unlikely and unexpected places (as in, see day 9). Beyond the happy finding, though, I have been enjoying the serendipitous composition of this image: the way the slant shape of the loader's front end is mimicked by the fencepost beyond, and both in a kind of call-and-response visual tension with the frame edge.

All this was totally accidental -- I simply cannot frame that intentionally with the iPhone, because it moves as I press the shutter and the photo I get is seldom the photo I was meaning to make. Like Arbus said: "I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better, or worse."

(An aside about Arbus: Two days ago, July 26th, was the 40th anniversary of her suicide -- a day I quietly mark each year. Arbus has been an extremely important influence on my own work, of course aesthetically so but more in the bravery and forthrightness with which she approached making pictures. Her unflinching way of looking, which I have never found to be exploitative or denigrating: Arbus looked, because she wanted to see. Not to judge or look down on someone she approached as subject, but to build a bridge between. I often see great empathy in her work, though undeniably her own great alienation is powerfully within as well.)

I think I've taken so seamlessly to shooting with the iPhone because, as I've mentioned before, it's so similar in process to shooting with plastic cameras -- the unpredictability. The utter lack of control. When I began shooting intensively with plastics I eventually began trying to control them -- trying to adjust the shutter springs to make reliably uniform exposures, taping the bodies to prevent light leaks, using filters. Then one day I happened to look at my highly modified camera and suddenly i just *got* it -- the whole point of using a toy camera is to GIVE UP control, not exert it. I peeled off all the tape and now just take the toys as they come, with all their quirks and foibles. I want predictability, I've got cameras that will do that in microcalibrated microdetail. I want surprise and the possibility of delight -- even with the equal risk of disaster -- then it's time for toys. Or, to a certain extent, the iPhone -- mine, anyway, seems to have a mind of its own. Make that an eye of its own.