Ordinary Goodness

I went into a processing buzz yesterday and processed some fifty images. In addition to revisiting my files from the trip to the Amalfi Coast last May, I processed images from the second shoot I did with my model, Arron, the first we did outdoors.

I look at the arty and artful images that other photographers, especially those who shoot for fashion magazines, and yearn to make similar images, images to stop you in your tracks to say, Wow!
But those are not the images I find myself taking or making. The images I have posted on my websites tend to be ordinary, documenting ordinary moments and insignificant time. My model shoots are also influenced by this way of seeing. 

Oh, there is much I can improve both in how I take photographs and in how I process them but I have always told myself I needed to find my own "voice" as a photographer. In the beginning we are all imitators until some of us realize that what we do naturally is better. We can't all be Steven Meisel or Mario Testino. We shouldn't be. The world needs the diversity of seeing that we can individually contribute our own of seeing else the world would truly be poorer by the limitation.
When I started shooting Kaleb, my first model, I knew nothing about fashion or model photography. I was simply enthralled by being able to capture images of a man that I could choose and create. Close-ups and medium shots, seeing him from uncommon angles, cropping the image to focus on some part of his physiognomy or body - the three hours we spent together were over before I knew it.

Photography allows me to cut the world I see into pieces. Maybe I shall never be an artist. With money and people resources I can set the stage more elaborately but that has not been my lifelong style. Our art reflects who we are and who we are is how we think of ourselves, and more important, how we live ourselves.

The 20 or so images I posted of Arron are images I have not posted or even shown him before. By the time I shot these pictures I had been buying fashion magazines and perusing fashion photography Internet sites. I was aping fashion photography. Arron wanted to be a fashion model. He loves clothes and appearance, something I don't put down but is no longer part of my own design of living. I wanted to help him pursue his dream. The last time we talked I told him I wanted to shoot him again but not try to do fashion shoots. I want to capture my own vision of beauty in images.
The vision continues to change. I want images of ordinary places and people but don't want to bore people with non-sequiturs. I want to encourage others to see, really see, instead of just yielding to the routines of indifference.

But I am also drawn to making something beautiful, if beauty is that which draws our attention and makes us take that sudden gulp of air. Beauty should liberate hormones and make our heart pump just that much more forcefully.

Nowadays with so many people owning equipment and technology with which to concretize their inner vision, beauty seems trivialized. Just writing about it makes me weary. But I find myself at times really shaken out of my rundown life and feel that surge of delight I had forgotten I could feel. Hackneyed and overdone our works sometimes rises above what we deserve. It is for transcendent moments like this that we strive though our hearts are sated and our minds disbelieving.

I'll keep on processing the photographs I already have and shooting new images. Frankly I don't have better options.

At the Broad Ripple Park this morning I met Dave, an engineer now retired for ten years. He told me that he didn't set goals. To set goals, he said, would be to disregard how we really do not control how our lives unfold.

Maybe we do come to a place where we can do something because we delight in doing it. Maybe this is what Joe Campbell spoke of as finding your bliss. Maybe I have come to that place, and what I do takes on a soul of its own. It is alive as I know I am alive, controlled by forces I don't own and loving it.