Day 21

Spent a large chunk of today staring at my kitchen floor -- small sections at a time, in great detail == because I gave it a desperately needed scrubbing. Noticed this basket casting its shadow as the afternoon shadows lengthened.

Day 20

These flags are the image I referred to missing a few days back, when I ventured out sans iPhone. TOday I finally got back to the shopping center where a newly opened store is celebrating with flags. Once again, not at all the shot I meant to take -- but this time I was more hampered by my fellow shoppers, who blew through the parking lot like it was the Indy 500 start line. Since the shot I wanted involved standing in the middle of the lane, looking up instead of at traffic, the two I grabbed were well let's just say rushed and wrong. A taxi whipping around the corner nearly rendered my children motherless so I retreated to the semisafety of the curb and just did what I could from there. A busy day today, fully loaded with ongoing life disasters (I seriously suspect I must have accidentally wronged some extremely primitive and extraordinarily punitive deity who is now busily delivering major vengeance) but it helped to know that I'd be making a picture at some point.

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.

day 18

This photo makes me so sad I cannot bear to write about it.

Day 17

Here's a first: posting a photo the same day I made it. I'm going to try for this to be the way things go from here on out. Though life does get in the way sometimes.

I have walked past this storm drain cover before and always something tweaked at the hem of my vision -- something about how it looks recalling fire circles. Dolmens and druids. I don't know how to put it -- this seems like such a random incident of modernity, but for me it speaks to something older. Tribal.

Day 16: The Inevitable

Yesterday, all day, it was my intent to get back to the place where I'd seen an interesting picture possibility, but it turns out I never left the house. Lots going on and the moment to put picture-taking in my day just kept getting put off. So once again 11 pm rolls around and I realize holy heck, I need to take a photo!

When I first began this project someone teased me about how long it would take before I did the inevitable self-portrait-in-mirror gambit. "All photographers do it. It's like it's required or something," he said. "It's all Lee Friedlander's fault," I retorted, but he'd already wandered away before I could tell him about Friedlander's "Self Portait" book from 1970; I remember very vividly my first encounter with the work back during my intro to photography classes. It was funny and human and self-referential without being self-obsessed.

I really didn't mean to fall back on a 'here I am in the mirror' shot so early in the project -- I wasn't after me at all, I was trying to do something low light with two lamps and one mirror but sometimes when one-handing the iPhone trying to line up a shot, I accidentally trigger its "shutter". So here's an unintentional self portrait, since the shot I didn't mean to take was much more visually appealing than the ones I intentionally made.

(iPhone, Hipstamatic, John S lens, Kodot XGrizzled film)

Day 15

I began Day 15 by spying a compelling image possibility I could not exploit because I, very uncharacteristically, had left the house minus my Device. I plan to go back to this place with my iPhone, from which I never again shall be parted, but could not do so yesterday.

Because yesterday I actually had to shoot a photo yesterday for a more-or-less monthly food column I write for the Baltimore Citypaper, and so found myself in the back yard setting up little tableaux involving tomato plants and mason jars of gazpacho -- and shooting them with my iPhone. (I'm still waiting to hear back from the art director on the images I filed to him this morning. A bit nervously: the photos looked good, but they are on the very small side for publication repro standards. The paper goes to press this evening).

I must say that before undertaking this project, I never would've had the nerve to hand in an actual photo assignment shot on my phone. But it was fun, and while I was at it I spent some time making other photos of random things in the yard I'd noticed. So now I have the happy conundrum of having to choose today's 365 image from two that I like quite a bit, images I enjoyed taking time to work with and compose. Both of them speak to a loose theme of my earlier plastic camera work, though it's sort of difficult to articulate: pathways. Openings.

Here's the second photo, which I think ultimately doesn't work but there's something about it that I can't quite let go of. I dunno, is it cheating to post two pictures for one day?

7/28/11 Addendum: the day after I made and posted this second image I started reading an advance copy of "The Unconquered" by Scott Wallace, an account of finding yet-uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. The introduction talks about following footprints on a path through the jungle and finding a single small sapling cut to lay across the trail -- unmistakable symbol saying, go no further. It turns out this image is in its own way a suburban equivalent. Leaving me musing about paths, both actual and metaphorical, and what an uncertain and meandering one mine has been for the past couple years on both fronts.