archaeologists of the everyday

each day, as millions of bloggers sit down to compose the day's post, we dig into our experiences and often, our photo libraries. why do we do it? out of a desire to share? to connect with others? to show off? to get something off our chests? to keep those nigglings of insanity at bay? to construct an album of a life? an everyday life?  russian has a word for that everyday life - byt' - which somehow carries more meaning - it captures something of the underlying sorrow of the quotidian sameness of the everyday. and also the kitsch that it contains. and the poshlust - which nabokov called "petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity." because there is some kind of narcissistic self-satisfaction in all of this blogging and all of the pretty pictures shared on flickr.

we are such a NOW kind of culture - i say as if there is but one culture. but i guess i mean the culture of the interwebs. we want to share things as they happen - works in progress, often unfinished. we can hardly wait to share. me, i seldom use photos that are more than a couple of days old - i have a need for the documentation to be of now. we do 365 photo projects, where we document every day. and while i'm grateful for the project, as a repository of my memories, there isn't something worth documenting every day. some days, it's just a box of vegetables from the garden or some walnut (or pecan) honey. because not every day is filled with exciting events. these traces we leave of our everyday...what do they mean? and what will they mean to future analysts? are they worth analyzing at all? or are they just byt' in all its glory.  what, if anything, is all of this doing to art and literature?

heavy questions for a friday. but i'm grateful to dubravka ugresic's museum of unconditional surrender for getting me thinking again. (and sorry that i can't seem to produce the right diacritics on my keyboard to spell her name correctly.)

voice and other indefinable things*

anyone who blogs or reads blogs knows about voice. it's one of those indefinable things, but you know it when you see it. or read it. it's something that evolves as you find your feet in blogging and learn to define your space and your style. for me, it's the magic thing about the genre of blog. it is what you want it to be. it's chatting and friendly if you want that. it's confiding if you want that. it's informative. it's snarky. it's really whatever you want it to be. a space to experiment and find that elusive voice.  and some voices you relate to and some you don't.

some bloggy voices lose their resonance for you and like an old boyfriend, you wonder what you ever saw in them. and some you wonder what anyone sees in them in the first place what with all those netflix reviews and the truly awful hackneyed poetry or all that overblown cutesiness, pouty mouth posing and overuse of the word rad [shudders]. of course, the beauty of the blogosphere is that you can just avoid those places and go somewhere else where you feel inspired or challenged or where you laugh or cry or think or just gaze at the pretty pictures. because the blogosphere is pretty big. bigger than the pacific ocean, i think.

but even tho' it's huge, you find lots of people out there to connect with. and you learn something from them or you enjoy how they captured exactly what you'd been thinking, but said it so much more eloquently than you could have, right when you needed to hear it. and you wish you could hang out with them. and sometimes you do. but not as often as you'd like. so every morning or late at night, you open your reader and you go see what they had to say. and that's because you like their voice.

* anybody know what the picture has to do with this post? i'll send a handmade prize to the person who comes up with what i, based entirely on subjective, personal feelings, think is the best answer. (and yes, i admit that this is a draft post that i started ages ago and i no longer remember myself what it meant. there is a chance that i just liked it, but i'd like to assign it deeper meaning than that.)

out of tension comes meaning

it seems my little ditty yesterday about documentary photography struck a cord with some (thank you all for your comments). and thanks to your comments, i've had a chance to think some more on the half-thought thoughts i threw out there.

i want to start by saying that i, in no way, was saying (or even thinking) that my iPhone photo of a photo in a museum was in the least bit an example of documentary photography. what i like about it (and the one above), is seeing my own reflection in the photo. it underlines for me the way in which i feel i participate in an exhibition (or really, most things) by placing myself somehow there. participating. active. part of it. that i chose these documentary photos of russian women to take my iPhone photo in underlines another interesting thing (for me, anyway) - that the ones i wanted to identify with were the photos of russians, not of norwegians or gypsies or rwandans (which were also represented in the exhibition). i guess it was these to which i could most relate. either that or the reflection was best there and i could see myself most clearly. which is also a potentially interesting statement.

ASIDE: can i say that I DESPISE blogging from a PC and IE6? who is still using IE6, you ask? morons. why is this stupid thing hopping up to the top all the time? ARRGH! deep breath. and now back to the regularly scheduled blog...

and to a huge extent, i agree with bill that many of the photos on blogs, while documenting everyday life in many instances, are not documentary photography. and it has to do with what he said about there not really being that much of the less-than-perfect. i know that aside from iPhone photos, i don't really share with all of you the ones that didn't turn out or which were from the wrong angle or where i had the settings all wrong. we try to show our best here in the blogosphere. and that's not really that real. documentary photography is raw and almost painful in its realness.

i guess what i was wondering about blog photos and frankly blogs in general, is whether they will be data worthy of study by future historians and sociologists, in the way that walker evans' photos evoke the depression like no one else can. i saw the photo of allie mae burroughs that redhead riter mentioned and i have to admit i was transported instantly into a steinbeck novel. i suspect what we're doing out here is more ephemeral, less dense with meaning (yet i continue to try to find meaning in it, like some obsessed maniac).

and the debate made me think about a whole style of photos on blogs that has arisen out of the 3191 project. a sort of naturally-lit, slightly lonesome but rather poetic and a bit wistful photography of mundane breakfast crumbs on a plate. because there's a lot of that out there. and i'm guilty of it myself. but honestly, i don't think it will last. not like walker evans. but i do think it captures the ennui of this present moment and that's something. i don't think that in the diptychs there's enough tension between the photos to hold greater, lasting meaning. because true meaning needs tension of some sort, doesn't it?

of course, a growing disdain for such diptych projects hasn't stopped me from wanting one myself. so we started across ø/öresund, which i share with kristina, where we do photos of life in denmark and life in sweden (and which i love and look forward to and enjoy collaborating on).  i'm not sure we are always beyond wistful breakfast crumbs (i do adore a good macro, after all), but i'd like to think that over time it will show that we have captured something of the contrasts and similarities of the two countries in which we reside, so near and yet so far from one another. and for the first time, i think that i'm willing to watch and let something develop and only later see what it really is. and that's something, at least for me personally. and speaking of kristina, i would say that of the blog photographers i know, some of her photos come closest to a documentary photography spirit.

my own photos probably never will mostly because i have a hard time letting them speak for themselves. that's why i've pushed myself to do wordless wednesdays, in an effort to try to let the photos speak and not try to pile words and meaning onto absolutely everything. that and i really don't like taking pictures of people all that much. rocks and leaves just sit still so much better and they never get impatient with you and tell you to hurry up and snap it already or yell at you for taking their picture without their permission.

but, i thank you all for your thoughts and for the polemic. it provoked a whole lot more thinking on my part and it's less a half-thought thought now and more of a two-thirds thought thought. but, as i said, out of tension comes meaning.

edited: sorry for all the stupid errors that were in this one...but on that stupid PC, it kept jumping back to the top and i clearly lost my place several times...sigh. another reason to love macs. and safari. but that's a whole 'nother post, isn't it?

documentary photography

i learned something yesterday on my usual wednesday afternoon trip to the henie onstad art center (i'm going to miss that place). they had a new exhibition up of contemporary norwegian documentary photography. the photos were all recent ones by norwegian photographers. mentioned in the notes on several of the photos were that they harkened to the traditions of american documentary photographer walker evans (1903-1975) and german august sander (1876-1964) and i intend to look into their work a bit and learn more. i suppose another name for documentary photography is journalistic photography, but it's about depicting snapshots of life as it is. and i suppose it's where the notion that a picture is worth 1000 words came from.

most of the photographers in the exhibition had little interaction with their subjects, they just tried to capture moments without interference, but there were several where they had posed the subjects. one of those is above, where a russian woman is posed on a train (the trans-siberian railroad, to be exact), tho' she is, in a sense, posed in her natural habitat. i had to snap it with my iPhone and i love how my own reflection is visible in the photo, which for me, further underlines the documentary nature of the piece...me documenting myself seeing the documentary photograph. that strikes me as powerful on some level, tho' i'm not sure that at the moment i can explain it. it somehow shows how the things we see, especially something like an exhibition, which is intentional on every level, creep into our own topography and become part of us in what we take away.

i think blogging goes well with documentary photography and many of us are amateur documentary photographers, showing our daily lives and the topographies (there's that word again, but it's on my mind of late) of our lives. maybe contours would have been better, but i love the notion of mapping inherent in the word topography. i wonder if blogs will be future source material for sociologists or historians looking at historical moments? or are they so ephemeral, they will just fade away? interesting thoughts to ponder on a grey and dark northern day.