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this may be all the use my loyal epson sees this year

this may be all the use my loyal epson sees this year

At some point in the recent past I became what many Americans consider an “adult”.  Maybe it is my age.  Maybe it is the geographic gorging of my under eye region.  But, I have officially reached the phase of my life where all of my peers are doing things like buying houses, sprouting children, or buying Prada handbags.

I’m doing none of these things and really have no ambition to.

However, by some stroke of this thing called “responsibility” I’ve decided that its high time to do things like paying off my credit card debt from my MFA thesis show.  If I start now, and use all my extra cash, I can save $3,000 and be out of debt in 12 months.

What does this really mean?

  • I cannot travel for one year. (Goodbye Mexico City, Montreal, Brussels, and elsewhere)
  • I cannot fully produce images for one year. (I can take photographs but cannot print, frame, and exhibit)

Two incredibly important things for me to be giving up for New Years.

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In doing this, however, I feel there is some hope of liberation. In a time of instant turn-around with digital imaging techniques and also an excess cache of film, I’ve been able to point at will and make photographs with little concern for the resources going into them.

I intend to continue to make photographs, but they will remain latent, unprocessed and unprinted, until December of 2009.

Will this liberate me? Make me take the image making process as something more precious, rare, and important? Will I get to know a new appreciation for the images I see when in 2009 I take the mountain of 4X5 film in for processing?

I cannot guess what an image that has been latent for 12 months will mean to me.

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Two things come to mind:

  • I’m reminded of Andy Warhol’s “Time Capusules”.  Warhol would take various items and simply archive them in brown paper boxes, in a warehouse, until he felt the need to revisit them. Here is Andy at his finest:

“What you should do is get a box for a month, and drop everything in it and at the end of the month lock it up. Then date it and send it over to Jersey.”

A. Warhol, THE philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and back again, London, 1975.