Hey everyone ✌️
I have some things to say that have been kickin’ around my mind for a couple of months. What is it that you desire? What’s your mission? What do you want to leave behind?
This rabbit hole started with the persistent feeling that it’s about time I did something with the half-decade of photography I’ve piled up, and I set out to try to decide what that something could be. I’ve gotten a little closer — let me try to unpack how it’s been progressing.
Back to Square One
Why are we doing this? I’ve been trying to plan a printed body of work for the better part of 8 months. Every time I get close, something holds me back from starting. I didn’t know why that was happening until I watched the amazing Reuben Radding talk about his external-photography influences. He says, in discussing Anthony Braxton, that having a much “larger mission” gave him the opportunity to dream bigger with his output. I sought out Braxton’s book to learn more, and within the first few pages it’s been clear this was a man wholly uninterested in anything that would not further his mission.
On being asked to speak of criticism of his work, he responds:
“I’m not interested in that, it’s not my purpose. I determine my own variables and my own value systems, based on the route of my life; they’re not about matching up to someone else’s expectations.”
As the author puts it later in the introduction, Braxton insisted on “the right to realise his own potential”. He composed music intended for harmonic communication among inter-galactic orchestras, knowing full well that if it ever gets played, he wouldn’t be around anymore (if you ask me, the guy could’ve composed a hell of a score for ‘Interstellar’).
The point is, Braxton had a mission. I sat down the other week to try to figure out mine, at least specifically for photography. (The guardrails felt a bit more tangible for a Sunday afternoon at a coffee shop). Sparing you the fine details, it was clear to me after that exercise that there has always been an aspect of my work that’s been unfocused, unclear - and that it’s time to get serious about addressing that directional challenge.
To my mind, it’s almost a meme at this point that a lot of photographers and photography critique expounds that the work ‘tells stories’. That’s great - all great creatives tell stories. Lange told stories, so did Parks. But unless you’re embedded in their worlds, what seems to me to be less observed is how driven they were by their missions. Lange for issues of migration and displacement. Parks for revealing racism and the fight for civil rights. Their mission gave purpose to the work and why they made it, and never the reverse. We care because they did, relentlessly.
I want to contribute something, at the end of it all. The slow, slow journey of becoming better at any practice means we’re constantly asking ourselves ‘how’, but so rarely ‘why?’
Telling stories doesn’t feel like enough in this new route of life. What can the stories change, and in which way am I going to contribute to that. While I keep asking those questions, it has altered how I’m approaching the editing of my work. I took a course recently with Thomasz Laczny, and during the process of sequencing for a book, he talked about the results being almost musical. Not just “this image goes well with this other image” - but also ‘this image has a conversation with images B and F, and they resonate with images X and Y later in the composition’.
Piecing the concepts together:
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Can a sequence of images represent a conversation with itself?
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What do I want that conversation to sound like in a viewer’s mind?
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How can my own hopes impact those ideas? Now? In the future?
Braxton certainly believed that potential was in everyone. In a way he’s realising his mission right now. The forces he put out in the world were intended to help each child “dream those great dreams that motivate dynamic participation”. I might still sit around a whole lot, but my mind’s certainly keyed into the ‘dynamic’ part of it all lately.
All together, my focus has very much shifted from ‘presenting what I do’ towards ‘expressing my desire of what can be’, and allowing my work to speak to that end. Whatever that looks like - I don’t know yet, but I’m so much more excited to find out than I have been in the past.
Editor’s Note: These photos are from a hike I took recently in Vancouver where I listened to music, enjoyed the immensity of the depths in the colour green, and asked myself a lot of these questions.