Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

May 9, 2007

Thinking Out Loud: Labored art

Last week I took part in a creative project that required me to document my day using photographs. It sounded fun–and I thought it might get me to think about where my time goes. It did, too, but it wasn't quite as much fun as I envisaged.

The problem was that as soon as the requirement to document normal life is added, life becomes non-standard. Photographing the cat which is generally either sitting on my head or glued to it first thing is not a typical action. The cat who visits in the bathroom is not petted in his usual fashion, because you're so busy trying to get the cat but not the litter box in the image. Daily waking up rituals are different and somehow jarring.

The part where I went to the local motorcycle shop’s yard sale was just fine. There, color abounded–clowns, bikers and their bikes, food, stalls. This was the kind of thing I would normally photograph. But the day to day stuff–how can that be documented? Even as I was taking pictures of my desktop and the various sites that I check on a daily basis, I was asking myself, “What is the point in this?”

I take pictures of textures and patterns, of sweeping vistas and people–often candids. Documenting like this turned my day into a chore, a catalog, something that at the end of the day I decided only to share with a few people. When I am a happy photographer, I can eke the best out of my simple equipment and get some lovely shots. When I am forced, by a commitment I have made, to try something like this, my photographs somehow seemed to lack their luster. It's strange, really: to think that a machine-made image should still take on something of the soul of the photographer. The intangible force that adds value to a picture and turns it into something special was simply not there.

Towards the end of the day, I was bored and racking my brains for things to photograph–should I show you what I had for dinner, that burnt pizza, that overexposed shot of a salad? I found myself editing everything through my privacy filters and those of others in my life, no matter how briefly I’d touched them during my day. There were the unknowning participants: should I show a child’s face? No, I don’t feel comfortable doing that and must therefore blur it out. And the knowing: Should I show our house, our car? No, that seems too intimate, somehow. In the end, it was not such an honest accounting of my life, my day after all…and I found myself asking, “Who cares, really?”

Such projects are presumably better used on adventurous days, days where you sky-dive or walk in crowds or climb a mountain. They are not for days when you read a novel end to end, or fritter your time away online–though conversely they do at least let you know the extent to which you are frittering your time away online!

So I think I’ll stick to my patterns and my textures, and recapture the joy I feel when I notice one of the world’s beautiful colors; I find that when all is done for an audience, something is indubitably lost.