The jar was round upon the ground and tall and of a port in air
Finished what I think is the first cut of the images for the new project. There’s something about seeing the set of them together that makes the thing feel real. Distinct. It has its own energy now, as a collection.
Next I need to send these off to get physically printed -- haven't decided yet between 4x6 prints or even-more-card-sized 2x3s. Then, a first pass on sequencing. Probably will borrow an [Alec Soth method of shuffling them like cards](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/keDjIt7BXuk), looking for pairs of two images that work together.
The set is no longer strictly Santa Monica/Venice, either. There’s that section of images from the Getty Museum, and then there’s a set of images from going to pick up my dog, Edgar, and a trip we took to a dog show that same weekend.
Tentative title is now The jar was round upon the ground which is somehow but too stupid and too pretentious to stick. Surely.
There’s a weird, liminal energy to the whole thing that I’m not sure will come through with just these images. I will definitely need to cut a bunch — there are 66 right now, which is just an absolutely absurd number for me to put in a book together at this stage, I don’t think I can engage people’s attention that long — but I’m also considering whether I should add some, too.
Because what’s on the other side of these images in my Lightroom collection are the pictures that I made before them and the pictures that I made right after them.
The pictures that I made before them are all learning images. The dog park show in particular is the first time that I really shot documentary photographs, images with any kind of purpose beyond “look at this thing.” The early-2020 range is kind of a turning point where I’d been shooting for long enough to start to get the hang of things, and the images before that have this slightly… desperate quality? Like I am shooting anything and everything, just for the sheer pleasure of taking pictures. So the juxtaposition is kind of interesting.
Then there’s this brief set of images right afterwards that are the pictures I took actually in the pandemic, as it was starting. And they’re weird. But they’re only really weird in comparison with the earlier Santa Monica pictures. Suddenly all the people drop out of the world, and I’m basically just taking pictures of an increasingly cluttered apartment, or pictures of a dog walking around alone in my LA apartment complex. And there aren’t many of them. I basically stopped photographing for a couple of months, until my partner came out from Colorado to live with me. I have 364 pictures from February of that year, 119 from March, 55 from April, and just 3 from May. Then it starts back up again — in July I took over a thousand.
Anyway— that’s where I’m at. I think more photographer should make books! Never been easier really. It’s really been changing the way I engage with these images, and I think it's improving me as a photographer.
