cyber senility (i love the madness)

the cybershot is losing the fight.  fewer images are developing into recognizable shapes.  if i were to fully personify the digital appendage, i would diagnose it with early-stage dementia.  it's disoriented, has poor judgment, and an impaired memory.  after a brief period of exertion, it shuts down with no warning, rendering me disappointed, angry, and lonely.  maybe i have a penchant for broken things.  maybe i can't let go.  whatev it be, i love the images it's choking out.

i might do a final post of delirious abstracts at some point.  in the meantime, here are some discernable survivors.

the first four images below are from a visit to a sick friend.  i think the cybershot performed honorably.

dying alive (i love the catastrophe)

the cybershot is delivering.  most of the images are dumbass abstracts of dim-witted pixels, but the ones that survive are an interesting interpretation of reality.  they look like late 80's-early 90's television stills to me - like i've taken pictures of a crappy television screen while watching 90210.  appropriately, sometimes that's what a day in LA feels like.

the images in this set are from a hike i go on a lot.  i usually take pictures, tho it's challenging to find a new shot in the routine landscape.  the cybershot's erratic death throes are providing me with a view of a parallel universe that is at once familiar and unsettling.  like re-runs of highway to heaven.

sadly, the images did not maintain their integrity during the export process.  (we've all had this issue at some point, right?)  hopefully, they still have legs.  

glory gloria

i went to gloria's birthday party at rocco's in studio city and met some great people to take pictures of.  i wanted to open this post with a quote from laura branigan's "gloria", but discovered it's all about a woman who's a total wreck of a human.  not the sentiment i was after.  then i turned to van morrison's "gloria",  and in that song, gloria's a whore.

so i leave you songless, but with musical visions.

thank you, mister eggleston

a group of wildly talented photographers gathered for a viewing and discussion of eggleston at lacma this afternoon.  in attendance:  dan shepherd, ashly leonard stohl (another one!  crazy!), shawn robinson, michael kirchoff, j. wesley brown, claire mallett, and tom johnson.  in from out of town for photoLA: david bram of fraction magazine, crista dix from wallspace, and hamidah glasgow from the center for fine art photography.

everyone enjoyed the show immensely and seemed to agree that we owe eggleston major bigtime for redefining fine art photography.  hell, i might not even be taking pictures if it weren't for him.  i randomly pulled his book off the shelf at a used bookstore in hollywood and suddenly understood something about still images that i never had before.

what i feel when i look at eggleston's work is a kind of loneliness.  the kind you get when you're left alone in a room that you just shared with someone.  you can hear their voice, the last thing they said still hanging in the air.  you can smell their cigarette.  but they're gone.  and what's left are innocuous reminders of their presence.  an indented seat, a can of coke, tire tracks.  it isn't a glamorous moment, or even special, and it would be swiftly extinguished forever, if not for the camera.

souvenir images taken with my deathbed cybershot.

my french teacher used to say, "it's not 'weird', it's 'different'"

the first digital camera i owned that didn't also make phone calls was a sony cybershot.  i took a trip to europe about three years ago and my gorgeous friend, sean, lent it to me when i arrived in munich.  i didn't change any of the settings the entire two weeks i was travelling because i just didn't know how.  it became my diary and later, after my kickass friend let me keep it, my companion.

maybe it's the winter weather that reminds me of my trip, or my plans to shoot lo-fi video for my newly designed website, but i fell asleep thinking about my little point n shoot.  so today, i took it out and plugged it in.  it's changed since the last time i used it.  it's older.  i'm older.  it doesn't see things the way it used to.  call it broken, call it changed.  it's a refreshing new perspective.  and i welcome that kind of thing any time.  i hope you do, too.