Homework &/Or Habit

Read this around 6am today, from Matthew S. Witkovsky:

"... displaced authorial significance from the creation of individual images to what Benjamin Buchloh called the 'administration' of archival information -- but also to quasi-narrative constructions."

Witkovsky refers specifically to anonymous photographs, but I can't help but think of my own version of this construction of the archival into a somewhat narrative whole. In fact, I sorta go for this at my best. Maybe it's having come to my own authenticity (questionable, of course) in photography through the act of blogging? In the blog format, the eye scrolls either down or across -- well, technically, the information in shapes and colors moves while the eye stays relatively in place, giving the body a sensation of The Scrolling Eye. This movement (sensation or not) coerces each view into a bloated or bending narrative shape. For me -- as both reader and writer, hunter and gatherer -- this fitting photographs into a narrative often feels like trying to imagine what's in an overstuffed black trash bag just by looking at it from across the street. 

I'm in a delicate place with this today. Yesterday I applied for a 9-month residency that I have little chance of being awarded. I feel proud of that. It's not painful at all, applying for something out of reach, and is instead the fun side of a learning experience. I had to gather ten images -- no more, no less -- that would stand-in-for & define (opposite intentions, in my opinion, but commonly expected for applications) what I have made, haven't made and want to make... on their turf and on their dime.

So this morning has been a playground (destruction, desire, camaraderie, wanderlust) of seeing photographs.

I read the lengthy and lovely introduction essay to a book I bought a few days ago (hence the quote at the beginning), peered through some of my photographs from three years ago (with only one eye open) and actively Did Not glance at any of the work I made on my recent trip to New York. 

I would really like to lay out each photograph I shot on my second-to-last vacation day, a day spent in Coney Island.
But instead I sifted through the last photographs I made of strangers on the beach in Galveston, Texas last year.

Denial, denial, denial. With a vague ulterior goal.

Small gestures to resist my own wants. 

It's a repetitive training. I can't tell if it's homework or habit.