|
Monday |
|
i've been fascinated by photography since i was a child. i loved looking through the weird sepia images of my european ancestry, the velvet family album with a wind-up music box built into the back cover. i wanted to enter those photos, live suspended in that timeless space where it was always saturday afternoon--or so it seemed. i got my first camera at 10, a handmedown Kodak instamatic from my sister. it used 126 film and detachable flashcubes, 4 bulbs per cube. i found i could take apart the cubes, remove the bulbs, and get them to flash by hurling them at the steam radiators of the house my parents rented in Blue Point, NY. i photographed our dogs, Honey and Spooky, and my box turtle, Pandora, who either escaped or was carried away soon after. i arranged my Matchbox cars to spell "Hi '81" on New Year's Day and began compiling albums with wisecracking captions. jump ahead 9 years, my first acid trip, i burned 3 rolls of film in five minutes and nothing's been the same since. i haven't figured out photography much. like any drug, it distorts time, makes moments seem more relevant. i still don't know why i do it, and i don't care. now i'm obsessed with micromovies, what i see as extended snapshots. they're images, yes, but closer to music than language--understood not as words but directly by a sense. |
