Jealousy

You are not your job. Well, at least not unless you want it that way.
Though, you do spend a fair amount of time shackled to your occupation.

When I get home, I find it hard to turn off, and often find myself starting off into space, thinking about the problems I didn’t get to that day. On really lucky days, I even dream about work.

So, How do you do it? How do you live your life and not be your job?

One of the ways that I try to live is to pretend that I am a photographer when I am not at work. With the digital age, it’s easy. A minimal up front cost, after that it doesn’t cost me anything to look through some glass, and save electronic bits of the world.

Then when someone asks me about my hobbies, I can say something besides:
“Dreaming about non directed graphs….Oh Oh….and parsing large amounts of data using magic and perl”

I would like to be a better photgrapher. Not sure I have any real talent and even if I did have talent, it’s hard to find the time to really develop my skills. That unfulfilled desire makes it difficult to see other photographs that are really well done.

Oh, of course, how hard is it to take a nice picture when you are in Tblisi. It’s so exotic, I can’t even spell it, I don’t even have a passport. And with THAT lens, I could take nice pictures with THAT lens.

That’s not the truth, that’s jealousy. Let’s face it. Ansel Adams took some of the most iconic photographs in American history. He used a large format camera. Basically a box with a lens on the front. ( A very good lens, but a box nonetheless)

Besides that, your hometown is exotic to someone. It’s hard to move beyond that initial jealousy and appreciate someone else’s efforts. And because so very few amateurs are professionals… more specifically, I mean that few amateurs can produce professional level work. Which makes it easy to find one fault to criticize in most anybody’s photograph.

I have decided to try and better my attitude, and give myself a goal to strive towards. It’s time to go commercial. Off of the kitchen walls, and on to something exciting. Like selling a box of notecards. Not looking for a contract with Hallmark or anything…but maybe I can have them printed on a small scale…even if a few dozen consumers find my best images to be interesting, that would be worth the effort.

Listen, the point isn’t *how* exciting, just to be more exciting than pictures sitting on my hard drive.

This bring another challenge to the table. How do you sell your viewpoint? Some of my favourite pictures are not really in a ‘classic’ style, not in a ‘street photographer’ style, either. It’s hard to describe. More like output from a deranged baboon that really likes to push shiny buttons.

One of my favourite pictures is a short line of electrical towers framed by a beautiful blue sky with cartoon clouds. The three huge metal structures providing a man made pattern against the natural surroundings. I thought it would go lovely in a nice box of notecards along with a notecard that has a picture of a windmill. With each of them having blue skies and clouds, I was certain they would make a delightful combination. My wife told me, and is correct, that no one would be excited to get a high voltage tower in the mail. Maybe it could be a “Sorry that you couldn’t make it to my party, even though you RSVP’d, and you do know, that this is all non-refundable” type of card, but other than that the marketability is pretty low.

Even fewer people would like to receive the black and white picture of the pepper a day away from rotting. All of those wrinkles made a wonderful texture that you could almost feel in the photograph. I imagine one could still hang it on the wall even though it is rotting food. Maybe not the dining room, and the kitchen of course is right out, but maybe the den. Or the garage. Aren’t those the walls where all of Dad’s insanity is supposed to be stored? But I digress.

What is the real question here? What’s the point? I guess I am trying to work out in my head how the struggle between marketability and artistic expresion works itself out.

I have the luxury of thinking more about this, because I am not going to rely on the proceeds of photos for feeding my family. I have an acquaintance that makes beautiful drawings of really strange subjects. Does a more mainstream artist sleep worse, or better than an artist that is true to an offbeat vision? Is it possible in an internet connected world to exploit the long tail of consumerism, and bring truly unique viewpoints out to the parts of the public that would appreciate them? I don’t know, and suppose I won’t ever really know.

Ah well, keep your eyes open for a black and white wrinkly pepper.