Novem­ber 1^st, first day of National Novel Writ­ing Month (or should that be Inter­na­tional).  In the spirit of the month, I will endevour to write a post every day. Let’s hope this doesn’t kill me!

This week: lots more craziness, including a con­fer­ence I organ­ized, two new port­fo­lios (2!), and a trip to New York. That’s the Big Apple, we’re not talkin’ Syra­cuse here. Not that I have any­thing against Syra­cuse, I once heard some wicked-awesome jazz cla­ri­net there.

Edit­ing down to a new port­fo­lio is a tough pro­cess. It requires a lot of self-knowledge and intro­spec­tion. At least it does when I do it. Its always a little bit nerve-wracking, but fun in the end. I use a trick I learned a long time ago (but was reminded by Don Weber of how import­ant it is): I print out every photo I think has a shot at mak­ing it to the final edit. Even some oddball ones, pho­tos where you think “what was I get­ting at here”, or pho­tos you think don’t belong with any oth­ers. I print them all out, and lay the proofs on a big table. Then I push them around. I sit some by oth­ers, I make little col­lec­tions, remove a few. As everything slides around the table I start to see con­nec­tions, rela­tion­ships between the ideas. That’s how a story comes together.

I’m always try­ing to under­stand what my pho­tos mean, bey­ond the mere con­ceit of the image. Look­ing back over the thou­sands and thou­sands of pho­tos I’ve shot over the last eight yeasrs, I’m start­ing to see some trends. Most of the time, my pho­tos are about bound­ar­ies. No sur­prise there, I’ve been strug­gling my whole life to over­come isol­a­tion, abuse, and poverty.

I used to focus on the external world. My pho­tos were access­ible, they employed easy meta­phors that related to con­crete lim­it­a­tions. I pho­to­graphed things like fences and birds to illus­trate my desire to break free. Then I star­ted to look at internal lim­it­a­tions. For a long time I used blurry, foggy, murky pho­tos to exer­cise my ghosts. On my vaca­tions I went to places where people had been trapped: Granada and Sara­jevo. I think I’ve finally got­ten rid of most of those ghosts. Lately I’ve been think­ing about inter­per­sonal bound­ar­ies. Poverty is essen­tially an issue of social restric­tion (based on iden­tity), so I’ve been tak­ing pic­tures of people. My pic­tures of people are the most expli­cit of the pho­tos I’m mak­ing now. I’d struggled to pho­to­graph people for a long time, but I think I’m finally start­ing to find my groove.

In all of this, it is my desire to make dark places access­ible. I want any­one look­ing at my pho­tos to under­stand what it feels like to long to be free, to feel haunted, or to be isol­ated. I want to sug­gest ways out of dark­ness, and to give hope.