With this photo I defined my style. What's in the center of the image, the focal point? Nothing really. Just space. My style's about space, and light.
That’s what I started doing over the weekend. I started taking photos in the summer of 2004 when I went to Chicago to give a keynote at LACUS (Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States). I saw that the new Millennium Park was opening and decided I needed to photograph it. So a bought a Canon Powershot A75 and off I went.
I had no further plans for the camera, but I had it, so why not? I started walking the neighborhood, taking photos, and got interested in the graffiti. “Why don’t I photograph that,” sez I to myself, “I bet there’s more of that around here.” Was there ever.
I started with graffiti, then moved to the city around it, and before you knew it I was photographing everything. When I moved from Hamilton Park to Layafette, new neighborhood, more photos. Then out to the suburbs, Maplewood, Peter building his bookshelf, then to Hoboken. Yay! I’m three blocks from the Hudson River. The New York skyline, boats on the river, and back to Jersey City and Liberty State Park for the wildflowers. Then the irises and tiger lillies in the 11th St. flower beds in Hoboken. Halloween! The Arts and Music Festival. The Demolition Exhibition in Jersey City. Selfies and shots out the window.
And that’s how I ended up with 31,474 photos on Flickr sorted into 39 albums. [And at least as many more – maybe 3 or 4 times as many – on my computer that I’ve never uploaded.] Some contain a half-dozen or fewer photos, but others contain a thousand or more (4485 for the Hoboken album). Some albums are organized by geographical area, others by subject matter. And many photos are in two, three, or four, or maybe five different albums.
How do I make sense of it all?
Click on the image. You'll get a new window containing the album. Click on "Back to album" at the upper left.
I decided to create a new album, called Sample Photos. I’d go through all my other albums and pick out one or three to put into the Sample Photos album. I figured it would be a 100 or so photos. HAH! It’s up to 389 photos and I’m not done. It’ll probably be 500 or so photos by the time I’m done.
And you know, that’s too many. Too many for me to grasp. Now, you understand, it’s not like I somehow held all those photos in my memory. I’d forgotten most of them. But then, when I see them, I remember that I took it. Sometimes. I did it all, but don’t know I did it all.
And I want to boil it all down so I can somehow grasp it, make sense of it. Not so much in terms of being able to explain it. But simply to feel that I grasp it. I figure maybe I can grasp 50 photos.
But how can I go from 500 photos to 50 photos? Can I do it in one step? Or do I take it down to, say, 200 photos, and then down to 50 from there? I could just go through the samples album and pick every fifth photo and put it into a Samples 2 album. I know, that seems rather arbitrary, and it is. Still, it might be worth a try.
We’ll see.
[All the while I’m thinking, what kind of a mental process is this? That’s half the reason I’m doing it.]
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