Awkward Experiences, Connective Moments (+ Crappy Images)

This month in The Art Lab, we took our inspiration from the Great Gordon Parks.  Truthfully, he was an artist I knew very little about until studying him for the group, but it was clear the group resonated with him and we were excited to draw from his prolific and profound work.  

The problem with studying paradigm-shifters is that the weight of creating in response to them becomes rather overwhelming.  

How does one use Gordon Parks as a jumping off point and create something worth saying?  His clear photographic talent and his ability to cut straight to the heart of a story creates a high bar to live up to, and one that can be paralyzing.

I admire Gordon’s ability to enter into a community and tell stories of the people.  His environmental portraiture proved a picture is worth a thousand words. 

His images moved the needle on race relations, as he was able to show the commonality of humanity, thereby literally changing attitudes of whites in America.  Barriers are broken when we are reminded of the universal human experience.  

One of his stories for Life magazine that centered around a boy in Brazil resulted in people donating money for the boy to get the medical treatment he needed.  Not only were people able to enter into the dire life circumstances of a child living a life virtually unfathomable to middle-class America, but he was able to infuse enough hope in the story to elicit people to take action.  

Although I am greatly moved by his photojournalism, I have no real experience with photographing unknown entities and doing justice to their stories.  

What’s a girl to do?  

Our group gathered to process the prompt, I brain-dumped, and I even visited Gordon’s current exhibit at the @artsmia for further fodder.  

Nevertheless I. Was. Stuck.  

 But the goal each month isn’t to alter who we are as artists, it’s to encourage us to create, and possibly create in new ways, all while remaining true to our calling.  What is the story needing to come out of me?  

For the last few years it’s been my own story.  And I get to remain true to that.  

It took a while, but I realized in some ways the goal of Gordon’s work and the goal of mine have a fundamental point of intersection.  

Gordon photographed the other and I freely tell my own stories, but both have the mission of tapping into the universal human experience to create common ground.  

But my work is to pull back the Instagram façade and bare my own real-life struggles, all while finding and creating beauty to infuse my own sense of hope amidst the darkness.  

Unfortunately, this thought alone didn’t point me into the direction I needed to go.  Fortunately, the sweeping scope of the month did. 

I spent quite a few 1:1 tea times with group members who felt the call to engage in street photography, but needed the push to get out of their comfort zone. I knew no matter what I did, I needed to step out of mine.  If I was going to take a picture of myself, I knew I needed to step out of my current bounds in a new and slightly painful way.  (Practicing what I preach and all)  

If you’ve followed me for a while, you’d know that taking self-portraits in the wild is the scariest thing to me.  A year ago, I finally stepped out of my home studio and took images of rewilding in a local creek.  It was a big move for me.  

So this time, I took images along a busy street. With smudged makeup and ratty hair.  Wearing a tiara.  

In my wedding dress.  

Lololololol. 

I wanted to disrupt the story of a put-together exterior by making everything off-kilter and more lived-in.  Because that’s my goal in storytelling.  Keep it real.  And real life is often (always?) off-kilter.

Was it uncomfortable to put on this kind of show?  Absolutely.  But only at first.  Because I quickly discovered that revealing myself in this way served as a point of relation. Some passers-by completely ignored me, but many looked and smiled.  Some waved.  One proposed marriage.  (Yes, you’re all invited to the wedding.) 

proof I had fun

What I thought was going to be a moment of embarrassment served as a source of delight and connection.  And dammit if that’s not an everything is about everything moment, I don’t know what is.  It was a microcosm of what I want to do with my art: drop the defenses and link up with the ties that bind us.  

These images didn’t turn out exactly how I envisioned (I CUT OFF MY FEET?  I COMPLETELY MISSED FOCUS? Rookie moves) and I didn’t have time to make new ones, but that’s okay because the process is the point.  And this time the process was personally paradigm-shifting.

For the film nerds, this was Fuji 400 (rebranded Kodak version) on my Nikon F100 rated at 400.

my only in focus image is from my phone. classic.

next time I’ll go darker and smudgier