Typing a letter with thumbs to myself at 3 in the morning… Just some scattered thoughts, really. Wanted to see if things came out differently when just using thumbs.
Lately, I’ve been feeling quite clear-headed, and in a strange way that’s made me less apt to blog. Rather I’m immersing myself in the study of drama, of Shakespeare and how the works are played, of current works of cinema and how they’re consumed — big screen? Small screen? Medium-sized flat screen?
My bachelor’s degree is in film studies, with an emphasis on screenwriting. I’ve always thought the importance of my degree played out in the cinematic way I approach still photography. I want each shot to have a certain mise-en-scene, and to look as though it were an instant captured from a larger sequence of instances… That’s how life feels to me, like a story constantly unfolding.
Now I’m having trouble finding the inclination to talk about my own story. I am absorbed in the documentation of others’ lives, attempting to do justice to what a day in a real family’s life might mean to them at some point in the future.
Also, I’ve been creating stories. I’ve been making things up — writing pure fiction — and seeing how the truth of life plays out therein. It’s interesting to see how tales can give voice to essences, how twists and turns can hash out and explain our emotions to us.
And, all day long, I type with thumbs, as I do now. A tweet, a text, an email. Sharing ideas, conversing with friends, doing business, lounging as I do — able to do it from anywhere — sitting at a computer much, much less. And so, separating myself for a time from my field’s innate requirements to backup and archive, and the need to act as if a particular moment in time could in any way literally be preserved.
Glimpses and interpretations are at the center of my focus. I feel inclined to use a slow shutter speed to convey a child’s frolic. I mashup photos into collages, minimalize landscapes into lines and colors.
Accuracy seems somehow false, when achieved in excess. They say we are revisionists of history. So why are we so constant in our indulgence to record? The way this moment seems to us now is evolving, as we are evolving, and therefore our relationship to it.
All of this is beautiful to me. The process. Thoughts on the process. The messy, experimental outcomes. The oddities of life. The fact that you are breathing in and out right now, and weren’t even aware of it until I mentioned it.
I’m newly fascinated by what everyone is going through in this thing called life. So much so, that I forget myself sometimes. Until my phone alerts me that someone requires my input, and then my thumbs are cued up, and I think as quickly as they can tap, what I might say that would be of some use in moving this thought or that thought onwards into whatever will come beyond them.
(Images featured in this post were created/manipulated using my iPhone 5S.)
