My anger is not against my world but myself. I wish I could see things differently most of the time. Mostly in a literal sense, but metaphorical as well. When I'm driving I see that the blue splotchy sky would be beautiful if those damn power lines weren't interrupting my view. The park would be beautiful if those damn brightly colored plastic slides weren't jutting up from the cement slab someone just needed there. I see my world interrupted. I see beauty distorted. I see things that I wish I could not. I am blessed to see. This ability also makes me anxious. I want to look people in the eye and have conversation. I want to share seeing with other people. I want to show what I can see. But what I see is ugly. I see the baby plants struggling to break through pavement. It is most simply speaking, due to my eyes that I can see, of course. But what can eyes show you? Portraits were made for an audience and I downright hate them. Thus, my challenge. When taking portraits eyes are not even focusing on the photographer but the glass lens behind which one of the photographer's own eyes interprets. What can you interpret from staring eyes outside of conversation? Can these eyes show you that I'm struggling to pay rent, that I'm lost beyond belief, that I'm trying? What is the draw to portraiture? Can you show a concept through simple reflections?

Update

So, you saw my first legs of my one journey in the images below...Let me just tell you how terrifying it really was, but again, doing it is making me find out a lot about myself, my photography and why I do the things I do. I think the bottom image for me is the most revealing of creating emotion for me personally. Not that I am personally attached to the image, but I see something I have never seen or felt before.... Its not about the fact that I am trying to understand nudity and how to shoot it because I have been denied it in the past, but seeing bits of myself. I was stumped and at a loss of what to shoot...so I shot myself...holy shit...did that start something and say a lot to me...I will tell you what as I continue to follow this path and shoot more and see where it goes.

Second process starts next week...I am hitting the strip clubs...update later.

Why I Am Not a Painter...

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

-Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)

For Mary...but everyone else, too.

Strangely...

...it seems that this blog's gone fairly silent since this semester's inaugural Photo Phantastic meeting.  Just an observation.

Something to remember: and said by my bestest friend, Annie Leibovitz

"Photography’s like this baby that needs to be fed all the time. It’s always hungry. It needs to be read to, taken care of. I had to nourish my work with different approaches."

One doesn't stop seeing. One doesn't stop framing. It doesn't turn off and turn on. It's on all the time. We just have a tendency to suppress it."

For Jacki

Lauren Semivan (she teaches at VCU)