Category: Photography

Album Cover Nostalgia

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My earliest training in the arts as a young adult was taking night and weekend courses in graphic design and airbrush painting in Vancouver. There were no computers in those days, and everything was done mechanically by hand. As an audiophile with a collection of LPs (250+ now all gone), I was always impressed by album cover art and spent a lot of time studying the fronts and backs of the covers. These days I’m more of a technophile, and whenever I discover new apps I spend hours processing hundreds of [my own] photos and images through one or more of the apps to see if anything interesting happens. Maybe it explains why I’m so drawn to the square format for much of my work… because these images sure remind me of album cover art!

The Mixed States Project

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Mixed States is a new project that uses archival photographs and double-exposure to explore themes of loss, identity, and emotional connection. By merging past and present it creates a portal through which the invisible space where human connectivity resides is revealed. In this first stage of the project, I’ve merged my father’s face with my own in a series of compelling portraits, where he and I become one person while at the same time retaining our own unique individualities.

To see and learn more about Mixed States, it is located under Projects on the menu bar at the top of this page. Thank you so much for dropping by, and please feel free to leave your comments or start a conversation.

 

Timeless

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This is what I know…
The core of being
is a timeless ghost
born yesterday
and every day
through every word
and every thought
caressing the heart
of the matter.
 
Me?
I am ageless—
the same as yesterday,
with tomorrow frozen
in last night’s dream
of what will be
but never is
because this morning,
to no one’s surprise,
it was today,
and I am still
right here
right now
forever in this moment.
 
Oh, but for today…
that place,
that state,
that familiar constant
where time stands still,
and where we breathe
the essence of ourselves
until the last exhale,
which will not be tomorrow
but some other today
not unlike this one.
 
Yet… anchored as I am to the moment,
I no longer recognize myself,
not in the mirror,
not in the mortal reflection
of my outer shell
no…
but oh,
in the photos,
in the miracle of arrested time traveled
forward and permanently captured
oh yes,
there is the soul of me
the familiar one
suspended in animation
transcending the veil of decay.

The past twenty four hours have been insanely productive with much thought, contemplation, and creation. Yesterday I was feeling out of sorts, in a rut, and thinking that I was in need of a new metaphor for my life. I’m done riding the roller coaster… there’s got to be another picture that fits. The image below was an attempt to articulate the feeling, which got me thinking about these old photos of myself that have been surfacing, which then split off in two different directions—one in the form of a fully formulated project, MIXED STATES, and the other in the form of the poem above, Timeless.

New MetaphorAnd that’s how I roll… barely at all, or fast and hard in explosive creativity. The images below are from the Mixed States Project, fully fledged and barely twelve hours old. Enjoy, and thanks so much for stopping by.