Since I recovered data from a failed hard drive, I’ve started to look over what was there (a ton).
These are some which resonated with me right now. From daily commutes to and from work, the above are a mix from evening, in color, and midday, in grainy, high contrast black and white.
These years of commuting and obsessively shooting were partly practice, partly mood, partly escape from the excruciating relentlessness of every day responsibilities. They served to take me out of my head for some time every day, while pondering things in a way which was more emotional than intellectual.
Every day I would choose a style to shoot in for each commute – one for day, one for evening. The results colored my observations of people going about their business in a different way each time, it was a very clear way of coating the “normal” with my own emotions.
What I am looking for now however, as I review them from some distance of years, is themes in these photos – what do they tell me now about what I am drawn to, subject-wise, by how I captured these scenes? Is there a pattern? A certain style that I favor? Because these photos, although they have a documentary element, are really not focused on an objective view of daily life. My eye is very much the author of them, however randomly they may have been shot. There is a subject beneath the Subject.
So far, I have to say that my preferences seem to lean toward a sense of solitude, departure and not arrival. The compositions and style I prefer make the humans in them unknowable, blurred, obscured, or otherwise isolated and caught in some in-between space. The mood can be melancholy, but more, just not very decipherable. Perhaps, comfortably alienated, if that makes sense.
But then, when you are in the midst of travel, you are not in any one place anymore. You are moving and thus, not able to be pinned down. You were here, and then you aren’t anymore. Things are not solid. And I think, really, that this is a true state of being.
Odilonvert 