scanning pics... assembling for files... digitizing the Polaroids
Though I wear a Union Jack pillow case on my head, I quote the French writer, Roland Barthes, from Camera Lucida: "The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so)."

Herve Guibert on Polaroids, from Ghost Image

Confuse the Issue is the scrambled message spray painted on the back of my suit jacket, worn in the attic space of Tom and Mark's house in Northampton, Mass., in Fall 1977. Mark was an avid photographer; there is a section of the Deleted/Extra Scenes on the dvd of the documentary, Silverlake Life, describing Bo Huston and Elaine Mayes going through a cache of photos after Mark had followed Tom in passing from HIV. Mark and I shot lots of the Land Camera Polaroids, and I first began the SX70 self-portraits in my bedroom at their home that fall.



"The pictures weren't good, but it was fun to operate. It was expensive as well, but you didn't have to wait, any reality could be handed back to you at once, in reduced form. Polaroid was initially marketed as a child's toy, though it was an instrument for pornography: it freed the amateur from the constraint of the laboratory....

"It was also suggested that ... photographers work on themes, the self-portrait for example, since the Polaroid lent itself well to this solitary activity--there were no witnesses, and one had total control over the image and over what one wanted to leave behind as image."

(pgs 130-131, translated by R. Bononno, Green Integer 17, 1998)

Barthes on portraiture, sort of

"The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares). In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter."
pgs. 13-14, translated by R. Howard

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

I am introduced to the book after reading Herve Guibert's Ghost Image.

I entered the San Francisco Art Institute without a camera, my 35mm art student camera having been stolen out of my car as I moved into my first apartment. Left with a Polaroid and a Kodak Instamatic, I made do.

Journal entries on photography, summer 1978

September 16th, 1978

The sx70s, besides being expensive, are too small to work in the context I want. The Rudolf Schwarzkogler impact is impossible. The sx70 looks like a joke, turning the idea into a hand-sized image, something clearly distilled into an object/commodity.

September 8th, 1978

Began shooting nudes...looked to Schwarzkogler for images to steal/inspire. I guess I feel I should question their success, and deliberate on them more.

I can't keep up the pace of photo-making due to the cost, and realistically, to ideas.

Several people, on seeing my new sx70s, have said that they're glad I'm shooting again. What should they care.

August 5^th, 1978

I look at my photos and think, well, what is the point?

Were would I even want to take them, why should I want to take them out of their cheap snapshot realm? Why belabor such a point? And why go on… with school, art trendies, etc. My desire to take pictures-usually there is no ‘photograph” I want to shoot, just want to participate in the act. The setting up, the posing for time.

August 2^nd, 1978

Journal notes to cover up the lack of assertion/immersion into photo-taking. My favorite series of previously taken instamatic stuff, other than the highly successful perspective series, was the close-up one taken at Peter’s house on Clayton. The prints were never any good, the negatives are horrible, but I like the content/concept. The size when enlarged is dramatic to say the least.

I have no tripod-other method is to tie it down. Earliest photo arose from a need to act in front of camera, as the camera was a fixed object, a recorder. Later, camera moved to a tripod and background, foreground, no ground became controllable. Less action, more focus on detail, environment/mood. Earliest express little more than documentation.

Is there a themeology class, similar to Paul Kos’s syllabus, this fall, where I can practice photo in a non-photo context. Sculpture-Jim Pomeroy.

Dec. 30 & 31, 1978

The Situations became my favorite band at the beginning of November 1978. I refer to them as the new suburban band.
Gigs with the Offs, the punk-reggae band lead by Don Vinil, had to be strange ones. "Die Babylon" preceded by "Mr. Toaster."
Now I wonder why I would post these, why I have so many posters of a band that doesn't have a MySpace page or an entry on wikipedia. Exclusionary, superior, or just pointless, wasted energy. Misspent youth. Or, just youth? It was the situation I was in.