I am doing a bit of a social media fast of late, which is why you haven't seen much of me around. Part of it is to redirect that time and energy into doing other things with my images rather than prepping them and posting them to FB, Flickr or IG or wherever. I have a couple other projects I would like to get undertaken. Part of it is also the stepping back to gain perspective and to think about how I have been using social media in regards to photography. I find it is dangerously easy to get into routines and as those routines get more effortless so too do they get more thoughtless. But also because I want to see if the more distant perspective grants me any insights into the process that I have not anticipated, or would not anticipate.
But I am breaking that fast just a bit to post this image which I just assembled the other night. I am doing so because I am going to use this as a bit of a rough draft for an essay I intend to write that will head out elsewhere and practice makes perfect.
This Holgarama was a bit of a puzzle for me. I mean, they are all puzzles for me. They are a puzzle to preconceive out in the field and to assemble mentally while I am making the exposures and then they are a puzzle to actually assemble post-scanning. The hierarchy of the layers makes differences. The blending makes differences. On the few occasions I have gone back to rescan previous Holgaramas to create higher resolution versions, the second attempts have varied significantly from their original precursors.
This one involved tinkering, sitting, tinkering, sitting, and more tinkering. I had originally meant the centerpiece to be the bottom, the seed from which the rest of the composite grew out, but in the long run it became the cap stone, pinning it all together. I had not anticipated that but it did solve a problem I was having in the assembly of this one.
There are three ruts these Holgaramas help me escape, three prisons of thinking if you will that still photography so seductively lures us into such that we often don't even notice the prisons we place our minds in.
The first is shape. If you step back and look at photography from a very detached point of view, it is astounding how willingly we agree to compose everything in this world, everything we can possibly think of into squares and rectangles. Most of us even use the same shape of rectangle: the 2:3 aspect ratio. Think about that for a moment. Is there a good reason we do this? Not really. It just happens to be that at some point somebody designed a camera to make a negative with a specific rectangular shape and it stuck. If these same inventors and manufacturers had had a preference for circular or triangular negatives and had designed film in such a way to accommodate this, well we would be exposing our photos in these shapes instead. And yes, I know from an engineering and design point of view rectangles and squares made much more sense in terms of how the negatives fit on a strip of film. But from a photographic point of view, this doesn't really make any sense at all, we have just convinced ourselves that it makes sense. We have created compositional rules to help it make sense. The thing I came to realize with these Holgaramas is that one of their freedoms is that I can build a shape to fit my subject. Yes, I know that shape is still composed of squares, but I can create a wide variety of geometric shapes with any number of sides and it isn't the camera that decides the final shape but a combination of the subject and my imagination. It wasn't until I experienced this freedom of composition that I really realized how confining the standard 2:3 rectangle or the square really are.
The second cage we put upon our creative thinking with still photography is the notion that a still image has to be made from one place, from a single perspective. It seems obvious right? We get only one click of the shutter which doesn't afford us the time to move locations. We cannot expose half the frame in one spot and the other half somewhere else. To be honest though... we could. We could do this in a number of ways. We could cover half the lens and move elsewhere. We could make multiple exposures from different spots. We could make completely separate exposures and combine them later. We could do long exposures and move. But most of us don't. To the general way of thinking still photography happens in one spot. At first this is how I did these Holgaramas too. But then one day it occurred to me that I could string images together from multiple locations. I photographed the base of Falls Creek Falls on one occasion then climbed halfway up it and photographed the top portion and combined those two groups of images into a photograph of Falls Creek Falls that presented in a way that is not geographically possible. Well ok, it is obviously geographically possible because I did it, but it is not possible to see from a single place. This Holgarama was created from three different spots. I started in the center of the wheel and made the middle column of three images, then I walked to my left about 30 feet to be right in front of the left edge and made that column of three images then I walked all the way back to be in front of the right edge of the wheel and made that column. I did this for perspective. I did not want the left or right edges falling away from me like they do when you view them from the center. I wanted to show the wheel as close to dead on as I could by combing those three simultaneous vantage points. If I could levitated I would have hovered up to the top of the wheel to make those images, preserving that perspective as well. But I cannot levitate. Someday, maybe.
And lastly, there is time. Generally our stills are fractions of a second. More and more photographers are doing longer exposures using ND filters and getting full seconds or minutes, but almost always these seconds and minutes happen consecutively or chronologically. So the third freedom these Holgaramas grant my thinking is the ability to pick out slices of time that in theory can happen over the course of days. I have done this only once, with an image I made of a cherry tree in downtown Portland where I assembled images of the top half of the tree at twilight one evening then came back later for a sunrise and made images of the bottom half of the tree. This is a freedom of thought I want to explore more in the future but it is new enough to me that I am still brainstorming ways to effectively employ it.
So there you have it, three freedoms of thinking/creativity that these Holgaramas have given me. Or conversely three ruts of thinking that us photographers have just assumed have to be.
Anyway, I wanted to get these ideas down in writing. Take this as a rough draft, not a final exposition. Many of these concepts are still turning round and round in my brain. They will on my walk to work today. Hopefully I get something turning round and round in your head too.
Holga 120FN / LomoChrome Turquoise (rated at ISO 100... more or less)
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