College was similar although the pool was more interesting and the choices more deliberate. I've never held a normal job (at least as a main focus) but I'd imagine it similarly. I was fortunate to join or create some amazing little scenes over the years -- particular clubs, circles of bands, cultural interests, TTITD, my work in the nonprofit sector, and lately photography and the art model circuit in general. When I found IG it felt like I had found a critical part of the photographic community and it was full of wonderfully transgressive, uncomfortably weird people. I may not be all that interested in some of their particulars but I appreciated seeing the smorgasbord of other peoples imaginations. All of that has been swept away over the past decade. I saw the last of it. THIS little corner of the internet may be holding some of it but American culture has turned dramatically conservative and unimaginative. Prudish and hypocritical, brazen...HYPERcritical. Things that even my conservative parents would have thought perfectly fine are being considered extreme. Here in the UpsideDown natural expressions are criticized and ostracized while true perversion runs around the corridors of power in suit and tie. Here I am on the internet about to say that the internet has splintered and undermined community. Yeah, I can talk with an artist from France who shoots beautiful possibly-self-portrait-oriented work but we're not going to grab a drink or make a dinner in a meadow or go on a road trip. I'd like to but it's not LIKELY.
I'm turning 60 this year and I can remember the time before personal phones. Once we moved out of parental housing land lines were an expense that not all my friends managed, let alone an answering machine. So I had to GO to their house and chuck pine cones at their window to see if they were home and wanted to do something meaningless and probably stupid with me. It tightened the community. Boredom, quite honestly, led to an endless stream of good ideas. I'd venture that the Seattle music scene was the last one to benefit from the lack of telephones, cable television and the rest of the Connective Leashes that we can't live without now. You had a night off from smoking pot in your friends basement trying to figure out that KISS riff and so you went to another friends place and drank cheap beer trying to figure out how to make a keyboard sound like an elk in heat and laughing your ass off at the results. But if you put a beat to it and really went hard....it might be cool? My introduction to photography was a combination of accidents but the thing that really resonated for me was creating personal experiences, real live moments that we could remember through the work. It still IS the driving force. I become....not a Luddite....but I think we need to exercise our choices about what we need and want in our lives. So fuck this government, fuck its tech-bro surveillance state. Let's hold onto each other and our lived moments in order to enjoy reality.
In high school we mainly have "forced community" -- you WILL be friends with these people because there just isn't anyone else available (one of the deep promises of the internet back when was that we would "find our people"). More in the alt-text. #alabaster #pdxphotographer #roadtrip #emotional
