Up the Creek

This little image crossed by my desk recently and it struck me as interesting. I love the year seven photo challenges, the 7’s amaze me at least once a week. Good work Miss W!

A while back I posted a blog on an art project I was working on with year 9 and 10 students. (The CD scaled fishes)

We finally finished the sculptures and they were hung in the school library. This was a change from the original plan: they were to hang outside the school. The reasons were many and varied including the fragility of the finished work. The most influential factor was that the library had a ready made, empty blue wall, just behind the shelves that was big enough to accomodate the ’school’

I think they look great in their new ‘pond’ surroundings.

I stumbled onto a fantastic weblink last week. I was reminded of the simple things in life and how we just dont see the beauty contained within the everyday and mundane.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15131

If you read through the blog entry you discover that the story centers around a man (Jamie Livingstone) who took a Polaroid a day - for eighteen years! Livingstone called them his Photo of the Day. They depict a life simply through images right up to and including the day he died. 6,697 images in all. The Jamie Livingstone site (link on the blog above) has all of the images indexed into months and years.

The story only seems to have broken in the last seven days. The blog above has had 8,723 ‘Diggs’, nearly two thousand more than when I first read it. The actual Jamie Livingstone site  got so many hits last week it crashed the server. A large company has offered to host the site so it wont crash again. After such exposure Jamie Livingstone also has his own Wikipedia  entry, entered just last week.

One of the best comments I have read so far about the images came from someone on Meta Filter, krippledkonscious:

“I had to think a little bit about why this is so stirring. This is not a technical achievement, nor an endeavor that requires an inaccessible skill set. This is one thing, done once a day. Something so spare and ordinary, just taken to extraordinary lengths. A simple thing: whatever struck his fancy on a given day - just capture one thing on film. Simple.”

Well I think its not so simple. I have been involved in several Flickr groups that endeavour to take a self portrait a day for a year (Flickr group 365 Days) and another that takes a self portrait a week for a year ( Flickr group 52 weeks). I have failed miserably on both counts. I now have an incomplete collection of about 75 self portraits which have been taken over the space of two years. I find myself boring as subject matter.

Have a look at the images of an ordinary life made extraordinary. It is hard not to be moved by them.

Watertank (c)author 2008

I have to make a confession, I love ‘old school’ style image systems. Film, paper, developer, fixer, sepia, Polaroid, instant, pinhole cameras, 35 mm, 120 mm, Holga, all of it. I have switched almost exclusively to film and instant photography. (Actually I am an avid Polaroid fan and am stocking up my fridge with film after their announcement that they will be ceasing production of all their film types.) I spend several weeks each year teaching year 9’s and 10’s how to make their own pinhole cameras out of coffee cans and develop the images using the three trays of smelly chemicals. I also spend ages taking, scanning and manipulating images, then teaching students how to do the same. Some of my senior students have taken and developed some amazing black and white images that have won awards and scored them some high marks at VCE level.

I have now drawn the conclusion that I would prefer the original to the newcomer- digital. I know how to use digital, I do use digital, both as a scan and as an image, but I find that it lacks some of the qualities of film and paper. People could argue that  these can be replicated in Photoshop. True, but at the expense of hours of work. My favorite image system Polaroid is absolutely unable to be replicated in Photoshop, a fake can be easily spotted a mile away.

If you own an old Polaroid camera my advice is: dust it off, find some film (Kmart and camera stores sell 600 film and occasionally peel apart) and take some shots. Re-discover the fun one more time before its too late.

Maybe I’m in the minority, swimming against a surging tide of digial manipulation and megapixels and that makes me kinda sad. I hope no more unique technology disapears into the ether……..

www.savepolaroid.com