My last blog post featured some of my best pictures so far.. given, I’ve only been at it since Monday.. and as someone who’s barely ever handled a camera before.. I’m feeling pretty proud about those pics.. Though at the same time my honest assessment of my photography is not so high.. and I think this series will sorta show this off a little bit.. I like how these pictures function as a series, but if you look at them individually.. they are less then red hot..

Ok.. moving right along….

I love taking pics of my dad “for some reason.”  One of the things I’m learning about photography is that it’s “all about observation.” It’s in large measure a process of looking. You take once slice of time.. framed.. what have you.. and you can look at it for eons..

This amplifies that one moment beyond its significants in the flow of time.. to put it a certain sorta way. Significants, in this sense, meaning.. well what underlies… well how you remember things.. how things stick out in the mind. Another words.. I have an image of my father that is produced through a process of interactions.. let’s say.. and those interactions define the production of that image.. they define what stays in mind and what slips away.. which often might has more to do with my own interior.. whatever is driving me, then it has to do with my father. Taking pictures takes me out of that.. to one extent or another.. and now we are studying my father as a subject.

My relationship to my parents is a complex one.. psycho-socially speaking. Perhaps this is true for all of us? At this moment in my life.. shortly after my mom’s passing, in a situation of taking care of my father.. still feeling dependent on the money that is whatever wealth they managed to amass in there life times.. all this, along with other life issues.. puts me in a strange psychological situation.. which basically amounts to feeling like the challenges of trying to grow up.

A few latter: 

I’ve been reading some essays by Carl Jung recently.. which have re-lead me into a certain way of thinking about my own psychology. A somewhat simple way of saying it is that beneath the surface of waking life, and all our “reasonableness,” lys a “psychological reality.” Reality is, after all, never experienced outside the context of consciousness or our “psychological reality.” The empiricism of science, among other things, has lead us into a spirit of missing this underlying psychological reality.

I’m not blaming science.. Its simply that the scientific age, to put it a certain way, has lead us into a kind of psychological makeup that’s.. somewhat one sided and materialistic. Materialistic in the sense that we search for answers in the material world.. and understanding psychology from a material perspective is.. at the very least complicated from the stand point of our current understanding.. which is to say neuroscience is in it’s very very early days. 

Bug I digress…

So what of this underlying psychological reality? My sense is that it’s through a kind of dialectical relationship with this that I’ll make it through my current life challenges.. Though photography, at least as I’m exploring it at the moment, is slavishly tied to the material world, it has become a tool for exploring this sorta dialectical process.

So lets see if I can kind of wrap this up into a nice little bow: In a certain sense, photography is giving me an experience of reality that is out side the context of a certain psycho-social drama.. This is to say we are looking at the subject / object… err, how do I put this? Well in the case of the following series of photographs, I’m moving out side of “my idea” of my father, to my father. “Idea” here being a psychological idea that is out side of a purely conscious idea.. or one that is beyond conscious will. In so doing we shape the psycho-social drama in new ways.

I’ll conclude this part of the blog entry by telling you that what I’m saying is an over simplification of the matter.

Some background on these pictures:

There’s a couple things you might like to know.. #1 The cat in these pictures is named “Kitty.” Well actually he’s named Ginger.. or thats the name my mom and father use.. This would be our second cat to have a feminine name..  so that’s where I draw the line, and thus we shall refer to him as Kitty.

Kitty is an indoor cat who does not like being indoors.. All he wants in life is to go outside.. trouble is that our last cat probably got eaten by a coyote and thus… well my mom just couldn’t see letting Kitty go out after that. Personally, I believe in living dangerously.. so I side with letting kitty go out.. but at least for now.. the household continues to, kinda sorta, run as it did when my mom was living.

Anyway.. so Kitty is always trying to get out.. and no one accidently lets the cat out more then dad! 

#2 My dad has dementia. His dementia has not lead him to being totally unfunctional.. and he still has some short term memory.. but for the most part he’s not very capable of remember much from 30 minutes ago, to put it a certain sorta way. So a lot of really basic things can be very difficult for him.. and I think you can kind of see this in the pictures.

#3 My dad has a habit of sleeping too late.. so its my job to wake him up.. and thus we begin.

On with the Pics! 

 

 

 

Ok, so dad is more or less up.. but how can he start his day without getting the news paper or getting the mail? Hope he doesn’t let the cat out!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aww, the taste of victory! 

 

So making a series like this was surely a lot of fun… And you know.. each picture, on it’s own.. the quality varies.. but as a group.. it’s kinda cool.

A final note / what we can look forward to in the future. 

These picts took about half of my monthly flickr upload allotment… they are, if you view them in flickr, about half the size of the originals.. So what I’m thinking of doing, in the future, is generally uploaded pictures that are a good deal smaller then this.. at least the ones for this blog.. 

I’m planning on releasing these kinda virtual photography books, in pdf form.. which will give you full the sized pics.. which you could even print out at full size if you liked.. 

I suppose the other thing worth mentioning is the pics are still not going through much of a digital work flow.. which is to say “photo post production” which involved working with them in Aperture and Photoshop..  which I of course hope to do for the books.. 

Finally, I’m hoping on putting Google Addsents in them.. so with any luck.. I could even make some money from the books! My ambition here being to pay for the cost of web hosting! 

So that all ought to be fun to do and play with.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Media Arts, Mom and Stuff, Photography, life, psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.