04/26/2024
Angela and Monstera in Costa Rica, February 2024.
How easy it is to be swept up. I was reminded that I haven’t finished going through my scans and editing images from our trip to Costa Rica this week. My friends at work, Yannie and Gareth, asked me to join them on Tuesday night to watch a movie after work. We saw Monkey Man, which was excellent, but isn’t really the point of this.
G and Yannie picked me up from the parking lot of the studio and we swung by their home on route to the theatre. The traditional tour of their house revealed a beautiful Monstera chilling in their living room. I’ve always love these plants, but in Costa Rica they hit different. For one, the leaves were at least twice the size I see in homes around Vancouver, but they also had beautiful imperfections in natural environments. My hosts’ plant though a perfect image for the studio idea of a Monstera lacked the struggle of heat and Leaf Cutter Ants.
I told Yannie about the huge size of the leaves and how I took a photo where Angela’s head is dwarfed by the collosal fingers of the outstretched leaf. But I couldn’t show her the image, because I just hadn’t had the time to sit in with the scans and finish editing them. I resolved myself to get through those scans this week. Of course, I have extra time today before hitting my night work, but no power in the coffee shop I’m lurking in to support lightroom and the harddrive the scans live on. Just enough to pull a few images to motivate myself and share.
Motivate is a word also floating in my brain this week. When we came home from Costa Rica motivation was wildly high. Inspired by the culture we found ourselves in my plans for the next two years evolved to include new scopes, newly determined to pursue the business(es) that will form a sustainable life in Squamish for me, and hopeful to help build a space near our home that supports photography and community.
But I laid in the van’s bed last night, doomscrolling the internet and I realized I haven’t shared images lately. Just from Jeremy’s Roubaix. And in reality, I haven’t been shooting photos really since then. The only thing I kept repeating is The Internet is not Motivating, and now I’m here, on the internet saying it. It’s a tricky line for photographers. Sharing new work, new photographs, snapshots, whatever kind of photography you do is inherently the validation of photography. It’s more and more rare that people truly make albums of their family photos, where they may sit at birthdays and holidays and remember with. The full circle of photography is the showing of the images we’ve deemed special, worthy of remembering, or necessary of further contemplation.
Our modern internet, apps governed by algorithms makes me depressed, unmotivated to share the images I’ve made. It’s depressing because I’ve spent most of my life wanting to ‘be a photographer’. I don’t even actually know what that means anymore. Image making in the digital age isn’t even close to what it was when I went to school for photography in the mid-aughts, when digital photography was ushered into the professional and consumer worlds alike. Pixels freaked me out then and algorithms depress me now. Even as I write this, the blog-software on my website provider keeps flashing a logo at me (it’s freakishly like Clippy the ancient (sigh) Microsoft assistant) for AI to help me. Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon-luddite who wants to make prints in a darkroom and tape them all to a giant wall in a studio.
This weekend is (I sincerely hope) the final two night shoots of the movie I’ve been working on. I’m sincere in my hopes that I’ll be more regular in the things that bring me joy (processing film, shooting photos, riding bikes, though not always in that order) after what is nearly two months of life interrupted by night work. I might be lined up to go right into working on another show I’m genuinely excited for this new show, it’s being Gaffed by the same Yannie (Big Dog) and it’s being shot on film, something I’ve never done since joining the industry in 2020.