feel like phone photos feel so much less permanent than film or digicam, it almost orients photography to be a functional medium instead of an artistic one... my camera roll is mostly just photos of stuff i want to remember to buy, or text message attachments. if that's how your brain is conditioned to think about photography, muscle memory for photographing stuff that feels more... photo-worthy will atrophy
i used to carry both a polaroid + 35mm camera with me every time i left the house but found myself struggling to actually use them for this reason; occasionally inspiration strikes when you see cool shit in your city or a beautiful sunset or whatever, but serendipity is notoriously unreliable
i think that having a list of things you can condition yourself to photograph / be on the lookout for as you're out and about, like friends, landscapes, skylines, interiors, etc. has been a lot more helpful for me. go out with the express intention to photograph <thing> a couple of times. then, start bringing a small portable camera with you when you leave, and the cue-craving-action-reward cycle will eventually take over and you'll have more photos that feel special and worth showing to others
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i graduated from art school with a photography and creative writing degree about 3 years ago and have been in a masters program for creative writing and english since then. i felt like i never wanted to do another photo project again after graduating and had zero ideas for one even if i wanted to. so instead i just carried my 35mm camera around with me whenever i went on trips or hung out with my friends or went on hikes, whatever. i only took photos of things that i thought were nice. old buildings, my friends in good lighting, colorful displays, pretty flowers, whatever other pinterest cliche film photos you could think of. taking photos without the stress of needing to make something important made me able to keep my love of photography so i'm now at the point where i'm ready to embark on a real fine arts conceptual project. it really does just take patience and finding ways to retain the joy it once brought you. creating with friends also always makes it more fun, so find ways to include others in what you do!
the photo below is just one i took of my friend anthony when we were wandering the city and day drinking on labor day and it inspired what will be my next project, and the first real one i'll attempt since graduation <3
Jan 9, 2025
My dad always tells me to take a lot of photos of things that may seem mundane to me today -> i.e the streets I walk on often, or the front of the coffee shops I always go to.
Simply because it’ll be nice to look back on, and the film is cheap (bc it’s an iPhone).
Apr 21, 2024
I like taking photos. Big, serious landscape photos with big, serious landscape cameras, film or digital. Lately, though, I’ve been rediscovering the joy of just taking a photo of what’s in front of me, with the camera I have on me - my phone.
It takes a little effort to make sure you don’t look at anything else on there (and spoil the walk), but it’s also a refreshing way to get back to what carrying a small film camera was meant to be - the joy of making an image without thinking about it too much.
Jan 3, 2025
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Mar 23, 2024
a treatise on the attention economy - checked it out on libby and got through it over the course of a work day, a lot of really interesting social and cultural explorations about how time itself is the final frontier of hypercapitalism and what decommodification of our attention and time should look like
the book starts with a story about the oldest redwood tree in oakland and how the only reason it’s still standing is bc it’s unmillable, and how being uncommercializable is essential to our survival. it ends with an exploration of alt social media platforms (mostly p2p ones) and what keeping the good parts of the social internet and rejecting the bad ones should look like
all in all a super valuable read; my only nitpick with the book is that odell isn’t just charting the attention economy but also attempting to “solve” it and relate it back to broader concepts about labor and social organizing, but her background is in the arts which leads to some really wonderful references to drive the points home while also missing some critical racial + socioeconomic analyses that one would expect (or at least really appreciate) from the book she promises to deliver in the introduction. but this does also make the book easier to read which is good because everyone should definitely engage with what she has to say
will definitely be revisiting
Mar 25, 2024