October 2007            

I created a tumblog
Posted Friday, October 19, 2007 @ 01:27 AM

I've been keeping my eye on tumblr for a little while now, and have been an avid reader of my favorite tumblogs. The more I read them, the more I feel the form is appropriate for the way I'd like to express myself online. In fact, many of my recent posts here resemble the kinds of post I'd be able to make more frequently with tumblr. I don't think rocket-fish will be going anywhere. Rather, I hope tumblfish will be yet another way to keep up with me online, with more frequent, less-polished updates that take less time to construct. Consider it an experiment.

Head on over and subscribe to the RSS feed now.

Comments (2)

Upcoming photography show
Posted Wednesday, October 17, 2007 @ 07:26 PM

The LJCC will be hosting a show featuring some photos from my trip to China. If you're interested, stop by! If you're unable to make the reception (there will be food!), the show will be up and the gallery open throughout the month of November. Many of the images in the show haven't yet been published on flickr.

East: Images From Beijing & the Henan Province
November 3 - 30, 2007
Reception: November 11, 3-5PM

LJCC Gallery
3960 Montclair Road
Birmingham, AL 35213

Hope to see you there!

Comments (1)

Naomi, earring master
Posted Tuesday, October 09, 2007 @ 07:54 PM

It's always terrible when one of your friends is exceptionally gifted in creating something you compulsively buy. Naomi's begun making earrings to sell on etsy, and I encourage you all to be wowed, inspired, and moved to buy. Her shop is here.

Comments (3)

Lately
Posted Monday, October 08, 2007 @ 11:22 PM

Joe's been trying to catch up with video editing, and did an especially beautiful job with this one, which was made in late August. In it, I am shooting one of my first photo assignments, the prints for which were not so good (and therefore are not online). Consider it representative of my life for the past few weeks, even if you've yet to see most of the results. Dad called me tonight to ask questions about what kind of scanner I wanted for my birthday; you can live in hope that most of my class work will be online before the semester's over.

Juggle Court from Joe Parmer on Vimeo.

Hats off to Joe's superior video editing.

Changing form
Posted Thursday, October 04, 2007 @ 03:49 PM

As my interests and modes of expression fluctuate with the passing of time, so too do my forms of input and output. I read this recently on Mareen Fischinger's tumblelog:

There is nothing to hide. I would not put up party pictures that make people or myself look ridiculous, and don't tell the internet who I have a crush on or privilege them in my online life.

In general, people expect my online life to exactly reflect everything there is or has happened, but that is not true. Sure, you guys are allowed to know that I am somewhat crazy and hyperactive, and that is part of understanding how I work (with both meanings). What I do with this online is merely a way of coping with my life. I need the output.

Mareen's talking specifically about online expression, but I'd argue that it applies to all forms. People somehow misconstrue one type of expression as a representation of the creator as a whole. While the expression may be truthful, revealing, and vulnerable, it certainly isn't whole. It is a coping mechanism, an output, and may explore one idea and one question which has eaten away at the creator for some time.

In my photo theory class, we've been talking a lot about Sally Mann, a photographer who has recently infected my life. I think this theory of expression as an exploration and a fraction especially applies to her work, which is controversial. One series (her most famous, and probably my favorite), "Immediate Family," contains many images of her nude children. People misconstrue her as a bad mother who eroticizes her children through photos, but personally I find the work quite moving and hardly pornographic. Another body of work, "What Remains," features images of decomposing cadavers at the Tennessee Body Farm—photos often viewed as a violation of the sacrosanct ceremony of death. Because of these two works, she's often depicted as a woman whose boundaries are ill-defined, who is a terrible mother or an artist selecting controversial subjects for publicity and attention. However, I think it's merely an output—she is exploring her children, their personalities, and childhood in general. I think her work speaks volumes about the violence and wildness of childhood—the part we often brush aside or forget as we reminisce about our formative experiences, or romanticize the rawness and innocence of our early years.

I think I become infected with forms of expression and certain creators of those forms in a way that totally absorbs me and prevents me from doing much else. Late in high school I caught and recovered from several poets, including but not limited to Billy Collins, Jack Gilbert, Mark Strand, and Naomi Shihab Nye. The latter two spilled into nearly all of my serious writing, through epigraphs or borrowed lines, overarching concepts or ideas. Jack Gilbert and Mark Strand got me going on the je ne sais quoi of absence and loss. For an entire year, perhaps longer, all I wrote about was absence, dearth, death, and loss, and it became the subject of my senior thesis. Strand's "Keeping Things Whole" was the be-all, end-all of my late high school existence. Everyone I knew loved it, many could recite it, and perhaps it infected others as it infected me. In a way, the creative writing department was a mechanism for spreading the disease of poetry, as we all passed along little books, poems—vessels—to anyone else ready to come down with something.

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Each infection with a creator and creation—if you really come down with it, and have a long recovery time—leaves a scar. Like a terrible accident, it can change your appearance. The way you look before and the way you look after can be so different that you must explain how the two yous are connected. People see scars and ask for stories. And perhaps it's also like a relationship. You take the poet, the photograph, the painting, the song, to bed each night as you're exploring, and when it's over you're left with scars of another variety. Never will you forget the way a piece has touched you, and when you encounter it again much later—or anything that resembles it—you can't help but linger a moment and remember.

Sally Mann is my latest disease. I can't stop studying her images, collecting information about her work, linking her to seemingly unrelated conversations through some abstract concept I've formed while mulling her over late at night. I want to show her to everyone because of the way she moves me; I feel that everyone, given the right circumstance, will be moved in the same way, but of course that's not the case.

I suppose my ultimate point is that I feel myself changing output. Once my output could be found here, online, at regular intervals. Once it was poetry for critique every other week. Now I feel it shifting, more than ever, to the photograph—the visual—which I can honestly say I haven't felt until this month. It's true that I've been a compulsive flickr user (and abuser) for some time now, but the energy was different. Now that I've learned to swim, I am thrusting myself into the deep end. I cannot find enough time for hiding in the dark room outside of photo class. My time there is a kind of meditation, and there is always much more to be done, not for the sake of deadlines, but simply because I am not finished.

Sally Mann has also sparked a curiosity in the idea of photos as objects, as well as antique photo processes, specifically that of tin types, large format, and wet plate collodion (all processes that I absolutely cannot afford). A local artist, Jenny Fine, got a grant to study with the couple who taught Sally Mann how to create wet plate collodion images. She lived in New York to study and work for a year, and has since returned to Tuscaloosa to teach art to elementary school students. Jenny makes tin types (and uses other alternative ways of producing images). I am supposed to model for her this weekend—an exchange for the opportunity to tag along and observe her process—and hopefully will have much more to report in the near future.