An old idea

amanda poolside, originally uploaded by Mr. Wright.

I've been thinking a lot about photography lately. Actually, when not worrying about an absence of anything resembling a career, it's all I've been thinking about. In particular, I've gone back and looked closer at the photographers whose work motivates me to go do more of my own — that, for me, is the definition of a good artist. Almost across the board, these photographers were doing work in the 1930s or '60s, two times with a heavy focus on documentary photography.

A book on the history of the Leica that Danny gave me for Christmas kind of knocked it into my head that I have been ignoring black and white recently, which is a bad thing, because seeing in black and white is fundamentally different than in color. Even if it's in post processing, thinking only of light and dark leads to different evaluations of subject, composition, the whole lot, and it's something I definitely need to revisit. The picture above was a color RAW that went basically unnoticed until I tried to imagine it in black and white. Only then did I see the simplicity possible with a little correction. What was an overexposed, and therefore slightly red, cheek was now something to be embraced as a central element of the composition rather than a skin tone I would be forever color correcting and subduing.

Maybe best of all, as of late, is the feeling that I'd like to start writing again, mainly about stuff like this. I think these two projects, which have in mind similar aesthetic goals of simplicity, clarity, the straigh-forward phrase, could be pretty cool. I'll try to explore it some more tomorrow on my day off. For now, beer and basketball beckon.