The wide reading is useful. It’s giving me creative ideas. I’m making sure I note the things that interest me, without over thinking or intellectualizing them too much. It’s like I’m just grabbing the pretty fragments for the moment, noting what ideas they sprout in me, and worrying about what it all means later.
So far things are pointing toward a project that’s deployed across various digital and non-digital platforms:
– a hand-crafted wooden box containing photos taken with a modern medium-format folding camera (a Voigtlander Bessa 667) printed on fine-art “photo rag” paper. The whole thing designed to be reminiscent of old-style photographic prints stored in a box. A family heirloom. An evocative object. (Evocative Objects)
– a set of digital trading cards, deployed as an iPhone app, downloadable from the app store, made from photographs taken with an iPhone. Am considering the possibility of making this interactive so that additional “trading cards” could be added by users. Using the trading card idea, both a marketing tool and information channel, applying it to a specific community, deploying it in a digital context. Post-Optimal design. (Hertzian Tales)
– live video feeds via IP but transmitted on low-frequency VHF transmitters to older, analogue, televisions. Analog In, Digital Out (or maybe in this case, Digital IN, Analog Out)).
– a photobook (an iPad book).
– an exhibition…?
I’m still not sure what my audience is here. The more I read and reflect, the more excited I am at the idea of making small objects/bits of functionality that are solely for the community I’m photographing. Things they can use to communicate and recall their memories. I’m less inclined toward a grand exhibition, in a gallery space, that’s really for people outside the community. Maybe I’ll come to this once these other, smaller, more fun things are made. But maybe I won’t, maybe it’s not necessary at all, maybe I’m just chasing the receding shadow of out-moded form legitimacy. As the Sicilian photographer Scianna says: “The most important destiny for a picture is for it to end up in a family album.” I think I’ll go with that…
Tags: april 2010