I'm pleased to announce that one of my images has been awarded second place in the still-life category of the APA Awards. I made this awhile back, dealing, as often, with parenting. The picture has picked up traction recently, which is nice, and I'm happy to be in good company in the competition.
Go see the rest of the winners.
Or, have a gander at some more off-kilter reactions to parenting.
That's right. Instagram pictures of the little one. This one got selected for the APA SF Something Personal Exhibition.
I spent much of this year making images that are really commercial, as I discovered when I looked through my set of images for 2011. There's a lot of product stuff - jewelry, shoes, phones and tablets - but none of it seemed "personal" enough. Much more than in previous years, a lot of the pictures were for clients, and those aren't allowed.
If I ever thought it was hard to be objective about my own photographs, it's even harder to do so about photographs of my son. I struggled with submitting these because, well, Instagram pictures of my kid!
But they're definitely mine.
We went this weekend to the APA Something Personal exhibition.
The event has really blown up over the last three years. I s'pose about 1000 filtered through Left Space over the course of the evening, to check out 100 photographs from Bay Area photographers. It's kind of like the Academy Awards. Well, the square root of the Academy Awards. Oh and I doubt the fire marshal stops the serving of booze at the Academy Awards.
But it's a great time. It's always great to see all the people you worked with throughout the year, and catch up with the ones you didn't. Most everybody gets dressed up (there was one guy in a tuxedo), which is nice, and there's a lot of excitement.
Lots of portraiture this year, gritty, kind of journalistic stuff, and lots of journalistic or documentary stuff too. I guess people want to deal with important things during a downturn.
I shed a little tear because I didn't get in this year, unlike the last two years. But it was a crocodile tear.
It's strange to move from someone you barely know, to someone you know really well. From someone who's running the "I'm so busy oh god never a moment to catch my breath" schtick to someone who's stuck and wants to talk about it. From someone quite senior to someone who's mom might be picking him up later.
And it's a real fun time.
Several years ago, during my second portfolio build process, I had many pages that had two images side-by-side.
This made sense to me, primarily because I created these images at the same time, in the same project, to convey the same idea. The theme is consistent across both images. I sat with Thomas Broening to review the book, and, about all these pairings, he had this to say:
When you put two images together, one plus one should equal three; all these are like, I don't know, one plus one equals 1.85.
As we talked about it, I began to just get a sense, a whiff, of the possibilities of combinations of images, and that I'd been looking at pairings in a very simplistic, dogmatic way. Which I'm sure I'm still doing, 'cos I'm kinda authoritarian that way. But still, it's nice to shoot for improvements.
So I'm rolling up my PDN Photo Annual submission candidates, and I've rearranged the Resolutions series I did early in the year. At that time, I'd conceived the images in threes, but I've taken the best images and recombined them into what are hopefully subtler, more effective combinations.
How do these work together? Is there synergy, or just repetition? Is there a visualistic, a thematic, a moodalistic, a formalistic connection? All four? None? Is there tension or harmony, or points of tension and harmony in each? Do obvious size disparities create story material or merely distract? Is it too direct, and if so, is it like a wake-up call or a punch-in-the gut?
Just trying to make 1+1=3.
I'm happy to announce that one of my photos has been selected for the San Francisco APA Something Personal Exhibition. Last years exhibition was a hoot - there were about fifteen hundred people there, which is a huge turnout. It was a great party and I hope that this year is as good.
New this year is the follow-on show at 645 Gallery. I'm eager to see how that turns out. I submitted three of fire images, about which I'll blog again tomorrow. Of course, I don't really know what to do with this flames on white work yet - it's mostly been a technical exercise thus far, and I haven't given much thought to purpose or message.
Entering some these into a "personal" work contest is a bit of a stretch. It's "personal" in that nobody paid me to do it, but it's hard to say that this is some sort of exploration of my inner life. Although I do love shoes.
The aesthetic of the black and white shot certainly fits more with the "personal" work idea. I don't think these photos make much a statement, however. They're from a Propville Dog & Pony Show, which was fun.
As always, I'm happy to be in with the in crowd. I'm thinking maybe I'll wear a cape this year.
