missing photography

liz-wyoming

I haven’t felt much like a photographer lately–for various reasons, and despite my best intentions–but I have been looking at a lot of other folks’ work. That’s been good. I love to look at photographs; I have lots of lovely books and places to go on the web, and there are many wonderful artists out there, both famous and obscure.[1. Like Vivian Maier, who I think will be famous, if posthumously. I look at her work, especially her portraits, and find myself wondering what she was like, as a photographer. Did she talk about her work with friends over drinks? Or was she just obsessed, driven only to click, develop, print and stack?]

But, I do need to get out of this rut I’m in, and I’ve decided that what I really need to do is some printing. I love to print.[2. In case you were wondering, old friends, Printerville is back up and running. You can find out about it all in this post. Yay!] One of the things that I’ve learned about myself over the years is that, if I’m feeling at a dead-end behind the camera, I should turn to the print.[3. My good friend Duncan tells me this.] The magic of the print was how I got started down this road in the first place, and there are times when it’s good to go back to the beginning.

As a result, l’ve been going through a bunch of my work from the past six to nine months, with an eye towards creating some long-overdue prints that need to go on walls and into the post. This has naturally led me through images from the cross-country trip Liza and I took in early June. For me, though, this simple photo of my daughter, charged up to shoot with her 4×5 camera, and taken quickly with my iPhone on a cold and windy peak on the back side of the middle of Wyoming, will be the image of that trip. It’s not much, but I see a moment that has since become a touchstone for that short but lovely week (head colds and all). Looking at it reminds me why I can get so charged up about taking a photo, and why it’s such an emotional connection for me.

It also reminds me that I miss America, but that’s another story.

america (v1)

americav1

If you’ve been looking over here for photos recently and been wondering what’s up, I apologize. I’ve been roaming quite a bit over the past month — for various reasons — and haven’t really had much chance to go through and actually sort/edit the pix I have taken. I have a bunch of things I will be posting, but right now, I’m sorting through the photos I took last week, while on a cross-country trip with my daughter. We had planned this epic, roving photo trip, and, in preparation, brought out all the cameras and lenses we’ve got to muster for such an expedition. Unfortunately, we each got seriously sick, and ended up making a beeline from Boston to Portland as quickly as we could get.

While that might seem like a big drag, we ended up having a blast taking pictures with our iPhone/iPad and Instagram, and ended up with some stuff that we’re each proud of. While we were in the midst of the trip, I got this idea for a collage/mosaic that might actually be almost as cool (to me, I understand if it’s not to you) as our initial, “we’re-going-to-document-America-with-our-big-ass-cameras,” approach.

I’m not done yet, but this is my first stab at what I’m thinking about. (Click the image above to see it bigger.) I’ll be working on it for a few weeks, and I have ideas about what I will end up with, but I do have a final print in mind — and a few more images I’m mulling over. Feel free to chime in with any thoughts.

If you want to see the raw Instagram feed, I’m ‘bigbuckaroo’ over there…if you’re not on Instagram, you can see some of the full-size images via the links below, including a few that I haven’t decided about:

Thanks,
Rick