These are my worst Instagram photos
Much like the poetry I wrote in high school, I’ve classified some of my Lomo, Holga, and now Instagram-powered photography over the past, say, 12 years, as “bad on purpose,” as if there were some sort of meta-narrative about photography in play.
In reality, the pictures I make just sometimes suck. As did the poems.
It’s not that I’m not trying, it’s that I try everything and anything, and over-process at the expense of little things like clarity and meaning. If I could expose and document every button I push and filter I swish my index finger over, I would, just to have a record to share.
I think it’s because I enjoy art — let’s just use that as a broad classification of stuff here — where what I’d call “the process” of creation is on display. I like brush strokes and ink blots and notes in the margin and full frame printing where you can see the sprocket holes. I like blogs and links and trails of sources. I like original source documents and lost diaries and notebooks and journals.
Back in film school, to play that card, there was a class called Sight & Sound Film where we each made five short movies. The first three were silent and colorless (and I wish every picture I ever take could look like it was exposed on the 16mm Tri-X we used), the fourth could have music, and the fifth…
Well, we built up the mythos of the fifth Sight & Sound film as an object where the rules no longer applied. We pushed into snippets of painstakingly synchronized sound (some more than others), and color. In my own fifth film, I managed to involve the just-then-bare marquees of old 42nd Street theaters, a dream sequence, color, film going forward and backwards and slow and fast motion, and in the most self-referential procedural bit, the footage to be used for the dream was projected on the face of the protagonist as he fell asleep. And just my luck, on that cold late autumn day on the tile floor of an oversized bathroom in our dorm room, a battery belt wore down as the footage was played on the face, which means the camera’s frame rate slowed and slowed, speeding up motion and letting in more light, until the exposure blew out completely.
It was perfect. Reflexive, layered, and procedural. A commentary on filmmaking-as-self-reference itself.
I should really put it on YouTube sometime.
