here under stars

Photography is the bastard child of science, left on the doorstep of art -- Beaumont Newhall


I've spent the past month or so using an upcoming gallery show I highly doubt my work will get in to kick myself into high gear about taking my art - particularly my photography - more seriously. The show is specifically an alternative-process photography one, and the deadline for submissions is in two days. My usual method of using a short-term deadline to kickstart myself into high gear usually works but then results in my being burned out by the project by the time the deadline rolls around, after which the whole art/craft form retreats to the back of my mind while its equipment lounges around in my basement. Not so much this time.

I've been dreaming about elements of the darkroom process. I am half-waking at five o'clock in the morning wondering whether I am sleeping on the right side or will the negative be disastrously flipped. I am coming up with projects I know will take me longer to learn than I have time within my deadline, and I am not yet discouraged. I am finally pragmatically planning making more room in the basement for trays of noxious chemicals, for processes that are not just the silvertone mainstream photography has passed by in favor of digital colour, but ones that are more finicky, more time-consuming, that produce unreal colours, that require being out in the sun. I am plotting a workshop at a local arts festival. I am building pinhole cameras out of papercraft kits and begging bigger ones out of the Fine German Engineer-artist who encouraged me into photography in the first place. Yes, over time, I'll back off and not be spending fifteen hours a week puttering on the deck and taking over the kitchen with trays of water, peroxide, tea, coffee, ferrocyanide and watercolour paper. But I think I've finally got myself stuck on it.

It's machineofdoom's fault, really. That's the Fine German Engineer turned photographer (Science Artist) I met when I was desperately spending my time constructing costumes in the theatre to get away from computers and start using the other half of my brain than my Computer Science degree required. Over the past decade, she has encouraged me to keep shooting (the only way to get better), to research artists who are already doing what I want to (which is not 'just copying'), to provide company in the alt-process darkroom at our old college and try a couple of my own prints (the first one's free), and to bother submitting work even to local unjuried fundraiser shows in order to gain confidence and learn the process. Tori is also a dishearteningly exact technical genius to work beside, a thorough researcher who already knows the names of everyone in contemporary photography doing what one is fumbling at, and exactly as harsh a critic as one asks for. Inspiration and intimidation in one big queer Teutonic package. And still, at the end of the day, when I despair over work I see online, in textbooks on the subject, Tori is the first person to remind me people have been doing this for decades longer than I have, and I learn fast.

So somehow, this time, I'm not dissuaded. For one thing, in my thirties I'm finally coming to believe I can get that much better if, and only if, I bother trying. For another, I'm reveling in a tiny corner of a technical art form where excellence can come of zen brushwork, simplistic forms, and gross errors just as much as meticulous eyedropper-mixed chemistry and fickle weather-dependent processing. It's a corner where the interplay of medium and subject can introduce layers of meaning into the simplest of pieces. It's a corner that rejects the clean perfection of digital imagery and deigns to go back to hand-made organic forms. Even if there is a digital step in each piece - and for my work there almost always is - the end product is lovingly hand-produced, away from the keyboard.

As I explained to a friend recently, what had caused my photography hobby to stagnate was that I got tired of taking digital pictures of things that were really there. This isn't.

Because every time I fall into another art medium I end up wearing it miniaturized. I can make a few more of these with other tiny plants and feathers, I think, if anyone is interested.

(Cyanotype: 'all we have is thyme')

I returned from Italy on Friday evening, met at the gate by the wonderful mister Pod with a coffee drink in hand that was not diesel-grade espresso, neither of which I expected. Work-wise, I am very glad I went. I feel like this is the first trip this job has sent me on where I got their money's worth out of being there, even with the awful currency conversion rates and a week of hotels. I recruited help for newly-critical code that's been broken for a year, spoke up on some topics that could have been derailed into unnecessary work for quite a few people, and presented necessary but politically nasty proposals for future work that will affect a portion of the international project in a way that got support from those who stand to suffer. Career-wise, which is not just work-wise, I've made some long-term intentions known to a supportive network of colleagues and we'll see what the universe cooks up. I did rather a lot of networking, such as it is.

On the surface, conference networking is wandering around any unfamiliar city eating local cuisine at the most hole-in-the-wall (or posh, depending on the management level one is staking out) restaurants that can be found and drinking wine and beer entirely too late into the night with folks who share a long list of personal and professional interests for conversation fodder. Sometimes there is dancing. Underneath that, it means hiking every day, accepting extended sleep deprivation, politically and interpersonally keeping one's wits in the face of excessive alcohol consumption, knowing whom to stalk in the hallways around food breaks and whom to avoid for a variety of ever-shifting reasons, and putting on a good face while being willing to withstand work-related meetings upwards of sixteen hours a day. If one is female, it can also mean constant vigilance against unwanted sexual attention from co-workers who wouldn't dare speak up in an everyday office setting, and against attention wanted or unwanted from the locals particularly in front of one's colleagues. For any gender, it means watching out for the mere appearance of an affair within one's professional community, accurate or otherwise. In academic circles, it seems harassment is rare but gossip is common and damaging.

Napoli is beautiful, chaotic, historic, trash-filled, chaotic, friendly, crowded, complicated, and chaotic. Walking down tiny narrow streets paved with cobblestones of soft volcanic rock, one is assaulted by the beauty of landscape peeking through the walls of apartment balconies with photogenically colourful laundry set out to dry, by high fashion and small crime, by psychopathic motor scooter drivers and unperturbed pedestrians, by the smell of decaying garbage bags piled up in alleyways alternating with the salty air of the Mediterranean. The people are vibrant, emotional, good-humoured and morbid; civilization in Campania bustles in the shadow of mainland Europe's only active volcano, which has destroyed the area once in recorded history and is overdue to blow again. Naples is a port city of world travelers and restauranteurs, and therefore the food is the Platonic ideal of southern Italian food the rest of the world has ever heard of, with fresh seafood thrown in now and then. It is crispy pizza and ball after ball of soft mozzarella I never knew was supposed to be made from the milk of water buffalo, served with perfect tomatoes. It is gelato and wine fit for swilling and flakey cheesy pastries and price-controlled espresso that only differs from Turkish coffee in having no sludge. It is also, as a product of law and good sense, usually GMO-free and downright organic, which anyone traveling from the States will notice when they eat their first meal out back at home, though they might not know what to call the difference. The only things I brought back with me were shoes (in my size, which does not map to US) and food and several gigabytes worth of photographs to process. The shoes say too much about me, the photos will rather explain the place, there is no conveying the food.

I am nowhere near finished processing pictures from Spoutwood Farm's May Day Faerie Festival, but here, have a link to the set as it fills in, and some bubbles.

ashre joined me for a return trip to a local abandoned government-run asylum after four years since my last visit. Some of the buildings are gone outright. Some of them are worse for wear due to human action from scrapping to tagging to more serious vandalism and arson. Some sit as they were when the facility was abruptly shut down in 1991. And some are being taken over by the forest. Here's a first cut of the digital photos; more of this set and hopefully some film ones later.


( four more )

I am currently a NASA contractor by profession. My job, at the highest level, is to make publicly and easily accessible data that has already cost taxpayers worldwide billions of dollars to acquire, so that it can best be utilized and those resource costs need not ever be incurred again. For this, I am paid enough to cover a primary mortgage on a tiny rowhome in one of the most expensive areas of the country (by necessity, as the job is only available in one of the most expensive areas of the country), and most of the household bills.

Growing up, I physically survived on meager family incomes in that same expensive part of the country because they were supplemented my grandmother's federal disability benefits, my mother's welfare checks, occasional federal and state unemployment, and, at the worst of it all, official-non-profit-organisation-donated food. Educationally, I was able to pull myself out of the statistical picture that paints through gifted and talented programs, government-funded after-school programs, and a full scholarship including room and board for five years of college, during which I also worked enough hours to jeopardize my grades. I am that modern liberal feel-good American story. In the grand economic scale, I pay it back through tax payments that are massive on the nationwide average simply because of where I live, through active effort to spend my income within the local economy, and through charity donations of in-kind goods, money, and occasional time. That's part of that feel-good American story, too.

I also have inherited health issues I don't talk about much that suggest I could (but not with certainty) die or be seriously, permanently, incapacitated if I tried to bear my own children, if I ever wanted to. I have, at my economically poorest, received care from government-funded nonprofit programs to keep this from happening (which, one may note, does not imply an abortion).

*

So, what does that all lead up to?

Currently, in the face of the imminent government shutdown over a farcical laundry list of far-right ideals, my job is probably safe because elected officials far from my own home are more focused on dismantling everything that allowed me to get where I have in life, educationally, economically, and physically. My job is mostly safe because they would rather legislate people like me dead. That's enough to make me talk about personal issues and my job here. Dead.

Apparently having the flu means finally getting around to processing photos. These are from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History butterfly exhibit, taken with a 'real' camera, rather than the phone used for the photo-a-day project. They should all link through to fairly large versions on flickr.