I was in Whole Foods on Second Ave and Bowery this evening killing time before my one on one conference with Marget Long my digital photography teacher at 7:30. I was listening to Fleet Foxes on my iPod and had “After Photography” by Fred Ritchin lain out in front of me. I had purchased pineapple chunks more because I wanted an excuse to sit in that sprawling eating lounge than because I really had any craving for pineapple chunks. I couldn’t stay focused on the book and pulled out my travel journal to make a list of influences I heard in
Fleet Foxes sound. I got:
-Neil Young
-James Taylor Harvest Moon
-The geeky folk like sound of Led Zeppelin
-Hymns or traditional Irish Hymn
-Greens Sleeves, which is a song I taught myself to play on a keyboard years ago when I was a girl. I played it over and over and loved the sadness of it.
What I sense visually when I listen to Fleet Foxes is a very folksy, woodsy, gnome like long hair in the tall grass kind of thing. But it’s not even that simple. There’s something very old in it. It’s kind of difficult to figure out how twenty year old males from Seattle could generate such a rich and complex melancholic sound. But I love it. I makes me remember something deep inside me in a place that hasn’t aged or been exposed to linearity of any kind but remains ever in a moment of awareness and is not mine alone. That’s the best way I can explain it. There may not seem to be any apparent reason why a black woman from Brooklyn would have such an eclectic taste in music but I was never one to block out musical genres as a child. I listened to whatever caught my ear as I turned the dial. The only music I can say I have ever disliked is Country Music.
So somehow while I’m sitting there finishing this list and going back to my book I remember that I put together my very first photo essay years ago when I was recovering from a severe bout of depression which descended on me like a hurricane in college. It’s so funny thinking about it now because I had no interest in photo technique. I was just trying to contextualize this experience somehow in order to survive it, get distance from it. But essentially I was putting together a multi-media journalistic project. I used to go to this copy place near 14th street that’s not there anymore called Unique Copy. I loved that place. They had self serve color copiers and this wonderful textured paper. I somehow mastered the sizing options on the machines and selected the pictures I thought would tell the story I was putting together. Some of them I took, some my dad took and a few Alexi had taken. He had an amazing eye and probably knew more about my camera then I did. For a time, in high school, he was something like my visual biographer.
This was before digital photography was as widely accessible. Jpegs did not exist as prevalently then and I was still using the Nikon film camera my dad had given me. The only way for to arrange image in any narrative way was to make copies of them and since there was no digital alternative it didn’t feel like an ordeal to me the way it might now. It was a labor of love, and survival although I didn’t know it at the time.
I called the book “Revelations” and as I was just getting into X-men comics at the time (I took over my brother’s collection before he moved out) I also made copies of story boards and characters in issues of that I felt were relevant to my experience and included them in the book as well. It was this huge spiral bound black journal thing I bought from an art store. I’m sure it was meant to be a sketchbook. Only the first twenty pages or so were dedicated to my project. It sorted of trailed off eventually into sketches and journal entries and visualization drawings. But that was my first legitimate foray into photography as art. And I have only just realized it today.
