This is a continuation from Part I
Photography had occupied much of my time in my childhood, but very little during in my teenage years. I was surprised to find that my archives contained only two rolls of film from all four years of high school. Other matters were on my mind and I made no time for photography or any other artistic pursuits. After graduating high school, I attended Rowan University. Moving away from home to attend school was, of course, a major change in my life. The first few weeks at Rowan I met few people, and made even fewer friends, so I naturally spent most of my time by myself. I would walk around the campus and the surrounding town of Glassboro late at night. It was usually very quiet, especially for a college town. I would walk around for hours, or find a place to sit, and just spend time thinking and letting my mind wander. I was struggling to make sense of things during these long walks.
Church with Star Trails. 2008
The campus library was my favorite part of Rowan. Whenever the library was open, and I didn’t have class, I spent all my time there. Most students kept to the study areas on the lower levels, giving me plenty of solitude on the top floor. I was exploring the shelves when I found a book about night photography. The book was short and mostly discussed the technical details of photographing night scenes with 35mm film. It wasn’t until reading that book that I realized that I had come to Rowan without packing my camera. At this point I hadn’t been taking pictures regularly for years, but finding this book made something click in my mind. I needed to start again. I made sure to bring my camera back with me after my first visit home in October. For the rest of the semester I would often bring my camera, and a terrible old video tripod, with me on my walks. I photographed the areas I walked past each night, or at least those that were well-lit enough for obtaining a usable exposure. A local church made for a good subject, although none of the photos I took were particularly interesting, I did my best with what I could find.
Abandoned Train Station. 2008
No one ever noticed me walking about campus taking pictures. Apart from one police officer asking me why I was lugging around a camera and tripod at 2 a.m., no one ever asked me what I was up to. I rarely, if ever, showed my pictures to any one, or ever talk about my photography at all. It wasn’t something I shared with other people and preferred to keep it to myself. I didn’t feel comfortable with my pictures and didn’t consider them to be any good. I assumed no one would be interested anyway. As I spent more and more time taking pictures, or at least thinking about pictures I could plan our and take, photography was starting to take on a new purpose for me. Taking pictures just made sense on those walks. It gave me something to work towards and fill my mind. Photography became almost therapeutic, and I began to develop a need to take pictures. This was a notable change in myself compared to when I was taking pictures of flowers and backyard insects as a child. Photography was becoming part of a new identity and a theme was beginning to develop with my pictures.
Photo shoot at RVCC. 2010
I didn’t stay at Rowan for long, and after taking the spring semester off from school, I transferred to Raritan Valley Community College. I stayed at Raritan for a few years, mostly taking whatever classes I thought would be interesting. I never bothered to declare a major or focus on one area. For my first fall semester I took a basic photography class that taught 35mm film. The class was small, and it became even smaller after the first week when a few students dropped the course after finding out it wasn’t dealing with digital cameras. For the rest of the semester there would only be seven students, including myself, in the whole class.
Abandoned Car. 2010
The requirement for the class was the I shot at least one roll of film per week. It was helpful for me to be forced to shoot. Having to go out and find something nearly every day was exactly what I needed at the time. I was, and still am to an extent, very picky when it comes to what I photograph, so having specific projects to work on kept me motivated. I kept my camera in my bag all semester, keeping it close just in case I got an idea or saw something interesting. I would often drive around with my camera on the passenger seat, pulling my car over if I saw a potential subject. Once when driving down a mountain road I spotted the mangled remains of an old car that had crashed into the woods. I spent about an hour or two with that car.
Abandoned Car II. 2010
A friend, and fellow classmate, introduced me to an abandoned farm house near her hometown. It was a popular spot for her and her friends to visit back in high school. Judging by the clothing the previous owners left behind, I believed the house was empty since the 70’s. The windows were smashed, the doors broken, gaping holes peppered the floors, and the musty smell of mold and decay floated in the air. In the living room there were great piles of old clothes that stacked up to waist height. It was as if someone had ransacked the house and gathered every garment into one room to be sorted out later. On every wall and ceiling the paint was crumbling away. The peeling paint revealed decades worth of colorful layers which once adorned each room. Years of history, memories, were fading away with that paint. Windows, whose curtains were long since lost, filled the house with sunlight.
Bathroom with Window Light. 2010
Everything in that house, every piece of broken glass, every discarded object, every bright green plant creeping in through the cracks in the walls, everything made for an interesting and complex photograph. Working with film is such a different experience, you must plan each shot, especially on a student budget when film wasn’t cheap, shooting a whole roll and trying to make each picture count was difficult. On my first visit I easily used up an entire roll of film, meeting my quota for the week. I was particularly drawn to the home’s second story bathroom.
Entrance way. 2010
I spent as much time as I could walking through the house. Taking in the richness and texture of the space. I moved from inside to outside to inside again. Going into every corner and every room I could find. It might have been the first time I was truly excited to be taking pictures. The character of the house begged to be photographed. It made it so easy, I didn’t have to do anything but record it with my camera.
Window and Mirror. 2010
I visited the house a few times that year. It became my most photographed subject. Most of the photos I took and presented to the class were taken there. I even returned a few times after class had ended. I often wonder if the house is still there or had its holes grown too big and the house now lay collapsed as a pile of rubble. Ifs its still standing I wonder how much it has changed. Looking back at these pictures now, I notice that I originally overlooked many of the very best ones when I first selected some to be printed for class assignments. I, too, must have changed within the past 10 years.
Bathtub. 2010
I remember feeling frustrated over my work at the time. I felt that I was just taking pictures randomly without enough care or forethought, without a grander concept motivating me. I figured I must be doing something wrong, or even missing the point altogether. I would look over photo books of some of the great photographers. I read explanations of how their work spoke to some truth about the world and wonder how I could make my photos reflect a deeper meaning. I felt this way even after being pleased with the rolls I had shot at the farm house. The photos I took were interesting to me, but I didn’t know if that was enough to make great photography. I was looking for something, but I didn’t know what.
Doorways. 2010
Finding meaning, either internal or external, through photography never played a major role in my mind as I took any of these pictures. Meaning always came in retrospect, and on a per image basis. I would consciously hunt for meaning in contact sheets, not in the real world as I held a camera. People I met during these years would occasionally ask me what the meaning was behind my pictures. I never had a good answer. The motivations behind my photographs were always nebulous to me. Perhaps most of the time there was no deep motivation because I was photographing purely in the moment without any care.
Dead Tree. 2010
Each shot was framed by subconscious impulse. I wasn’t working towards any definable goal, be it photographing an object or feeling, but rather I was photographing what I felt without giving much thought to the ideas behind my pictures until I was in the darkroom. Just what I thought at the moment made it on the film. It was an unfocused time, but maybe it spoke of something real. Whether or not I got good photographs might have been a byproduct of my state of mind back then, and nothing more. Maybe this is even the secret to meaningful and purposeful photography. To shoot what speaks to you. To shoot without pretense.
Indifference. 2010
As the weeks went on, I found it easier to find subjects to photograph. I wasn’t struggling to find something interesting like when I was walking about the quiet campus of Rowan. Nothing significant had changed about my environment, the change came from how I saw the environment and those in it. I became better at noticing the details around me. I learned that there was a seemingly limitless number of potential photographs everywhere I went. I just needed to be in the right state of mind to truly see. Photography was sculpting my vision of the world.
Untitled. 2010
It feels like there is a battle between what my subconscious mind, influenced by my preferences and experiences, and how the conscious part of my brain wants my work to be presented. These pictures have been through the filter of my current state of mind. I am presenting them as I interpret them nearly a decade later, and I’m choosing only the images that caught my eye as I thumbed through my old contact sheets. I’m reminded of the story of photographer Vivian Maier, who kept her work to herself her entire life, only to have her photos discovered after her death and curated, ex post facto, by people who she never met. Her work was shown to the world unfiltered by her own reservations; if she had any of course. Her work ended up becoming a presentation of her pure photographic instincts, rather than representing any self-imposed expectations she put on herself and her work afterwards. But did that lead to a greater amount of authenticity? I am choosing what goes into this article as the person I became, not who I was back then. What would he have chosen? How would he describe these photographs? What would he feel?
Falling Paint. 2010
Towards the end of the semester I had several of my prints selected for a student art show. I couldn’t attend the actual show, but when I was preparing and mounting the prints in the photo lab after class, a fellow student looked over at the five or so pictures I had laid out on the table and said “Your photos make the world look like a lonely place.” That comment really stuck with me. I’ll never forget her saying that. It made perfect sense. It was the most succinct explanation of my pictures from those years. Of all the times I was asked to describe any of my photos to the class I never put it so eloquently. I was, in fact, rather terrible at critiquing my photos, compared to the rest of the students. I could never articulate the reasoning behind any of them. She explained my pictures to me in a way that made me better understand my own work. It might seem odd, but that thought had never occurred to me before. I was photographing loneliness.
Reserved. 2010
I do see the feelings of loneliness, longing, and isolation in most of these pictures. Maybe even the feeling of forgetting, as if something was slipping away. In retrospect, they have an almost a dream-like quality to them. I believe that’s simply because I felt alone at the time. I had recently lost my then closest friend, a long-term relationship of mine had ended, I moved twice, switched schools, and I had lost touch with most of my friends around this time. I didn’t realize any of my personal feelings were influencing my photography. I was almost too naive to make that connection. I didn’t look at my photography in any sort of introspective way. I distracted myself with trying to find meaning, or maybe someone else’s meaning, in my photographs. When all I had to do was take pictures and let my work grow naturally, guided by my instincts and emotions. Sometimes its better not to over think, and instead just shoot.
Untitled. 2010
I began this project to understand my growth as a photographer and to learn to appreciate my early work for what it is. I believe I can look back at this time and honestly say that these are some of my favorite photographs. My work now is very different, and these old photographs capture a part of my life that is long over, a state of mind I’m no longer in. I couldn’t take these pictures again, not with who I am now. This period was formative in who I became as a photographer, an artist, and a person. These photographs exist, along with the person who made them, in the past. Comparing these images to ones I shot within the last few years shows how much I changed as a person. What I care about, what fascinates me, what I consider great photography, and how I see the world are all so different now. When a person takes photographs, they can’t help but inject some parts of themselves into each picture. The camera looks back to see you as well as it sees your subject.
Field Moonlight. 2010
