words

A fotoblog

2024.9.6

Why share my thoughts as manifest through images over the years? What is my obsession with documentation of the everyday? Who aside from some close friends and family will ever care? Am I seeking a legacy? Am I trying to remember every moment of my life a clearly as the day I lived it? Am I holding on to the past like a nostalgic fool? Am I attempting some sort if notoriety? Is there a purpose to seeing my younger eyes looking back at me with a question to my now future self? What kind of strange navel gazing is this? Do I even understand what I am doing and why I do it? 

In the absence of an answer I am reminded of one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies (see below), Smoke directed by Wayne Wang. screenplay written by Paul Auster. In the scene the photographer is sharing his lifetime's oeuvre of photographs (a collection of images of exactly the same block in Brooklyn from the same angle every day at the same time). The artist's friend is quickly flipping through the photographs, stricken by the absurdity of documenting the same thing every day. At one point the artist says: 

You will never get it unless you slow down...[the photographs] are all the same but they are all different. You got your bright mornings and your dark mornings; summer light and you got autumn light; week days and weekends; you got people in overcoats and galoshes and people in t-shirts and shorts; sometimes same people sometimes different ones; sometimes different ones become the same; then the same ones disappear; the earth revolves around the sun and every day the earth receives the sun at a different angle.  You know how it is tomorrow, tomorrow, and  tomorrow time keeps its spinning pace...People say you have to travel to see the world, sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle.  - from the movie Smoke