REFLECTING ON REFLECTIONS

For the last few weeks my mind's been cluttered up with extraneous things, like the economic mess, watching network tv series at night, and being pissed about the small percentage of a sale that as a fine art photographer that isn't well known receives.After the gallery takes their 50% cut, and I've paid a quarter of the total for expenses, I'm less and less willing to sell work for my pitance when I continually realize that the reason for the sale in the piece in the first place, is that the buyer likes the image....and, that's the part I'm responsible for....the image, damn it. When that photograph is hanging on the wall in someone's house or office, it's because that person wants to live that particular image.

My rant has nothing to do with these photos, except to explain that I'm not shooting much these days. What's also going on is I'm taking a video production class, which is dragging my head away from stills and leaving me in the middle of nowhere, because I haven't started filming anything yet. Hence, tv shows are appealing... paying attention to the editing that goes on, particularly.

But, today, while drinking a cup of coffee out on the back porch, I noticed the reflections of the trees in the glass behind me, and so, fueled on joe, hauled out the camera. It came to mind that there was a connection to some reflection images I did over Xmas in NYC. These city window shots were done at Bergdorf''s on 5th Ave.

Double pane glass gives a bit of a stuttering to the image, which I like. The angle at which the camera was held to the glass decided how it would record the reflection.

I don't know about how other artists find their connections and similarities of the way they look at things, or come up with variations on a theme or subject, but for me, over the years of shooting, threads of ideas continue to show themselves, sometimes dormant over a period of months or years, only to surface again and again in a slightly different way, informed by a maturing or shift of consciousness on my part. Creating books seem like the best way to make myself pick through the archives of negatives, and slides, scour the boxes of prints, hit the hard drives of digital files, and get this lifetime of photography so far organized in some fashion. I do think that the process would reveal a great deal of insight into the heart of my passion and set a compass for the future.