043: Smile

Smile, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Happy Sunday

Imagine you are at the side of a pool looking out along a diving board, are your pictures 'out there' on the board, while your diary writing is the real you safely on the land? Is there any risk that your art will just slip out too far, or that you and your writing might fall into the water? What if you walk too far out along that board to reach your art and then cannot find your way back? I mention this only because I notice that many people write about one thing, often the mundane real life stuff or technical description of the photographic process, and then their photographic images show something else. Can we tie our words and the expression of our images closer together, or is it necessary for some reason to keep them apart? Are our happy pictures a reaction to something else in our lives, or a striving for something we are not sure about?

Our words are one expression of ourselves, and our images are another, but neither are actually us, although together they give other people a better picture of us than either alone. Instead of imagining our lives and art as a diving board, perhaps it would be better to consider a see-saw instead, with our words at one end and our images at the other, with us as the fulcrum, that point of balance. Perhaps we use our pictures to express what our words cannot, together they better forming or describing our art, or to balance less positive elsewhere in our lives? If this is the case, if we change what we write about, does it also change what we photograph and display for others to see? If true, perhaps if we change what we write in our diaries, we will also change what photographs we choose to take or show - and vice versa? It might be easier to show in images what we lack the confidence to do so with words, or the other way around, and by experimenting with the form we have more confidence in might help us to do more with the other?

By creating this image of me pretending to smile, it helped me write that I was feeling sad that my wife had to stay on for another ten days in New York while I returned home. Would I have written that if first I had not taken the picture and then played around with it until it fitted my mood?