kbdiary

Brooklyn, Summer 2010

I really need to get back working on unfinished pieces… or find a means to print new material.  Well, both.  A lot of both.

Ryan Walker - November 2011

Wounded in blue, super rough digital sketch with words by Seamus Stimpson

Rite of Passage

New memories for the old holy days spent in sessions dual diagnoses & harlem girls
Confrontational dial tones & sisters & memories of innocence transformed
into words & letters filled with magic hurt
Everyone of them ends the same
way
‘I want to get better… …I love you… …I want to be there.’

Sorting through a folder on my desktop named “the void”, came across this- a terrible close up on an acrylic coated set of portraits.

The round red sun heaves darkly out of the sea.

The walls and towers are warmed and gleam.

Sounds go drowsily up from streets and wharves.

The city stirs like one that is half in dream.

And the mist flows up by dazzling walls and windows,

Where one by one we wake and rise.

We gaze at the pale grey lustrous sea a moment,

We rub the darkness from our eyes,

And face our thousand devious secret mornings …

And do not see how the pale mist, slowly ascending,

Shaped by the sun, shines like a white-robed dreamer

Compassionate over our towers bending.

There, like one who gazes into a crystal,

He broods upon our city with sombre eyes;

He sees our secret fears vaguely unfolding,

Sees cloudy symbols shape to rise.

Each gleaming point of light is like a seed

Dilating swiftly to coiling fires.

Each cloud becomes a rapidly dimming face,

Each hurrying face records its strange desires.

We descend our separate stairs toward the day,

Merge in the somnolent mass that fills the street,

Lift our eyes to the soft blue space of sky,

And walk by the well-known walls with accustomed feet.

-Conrad Aiken

Sweat, September 2011.

[forgive me for taking yet another accidental hiatus from working on my website and the photography it should contain, not to mention total abandonment of my creative process and the work it should produce.]

Wounded, August 2011

Spanish Mike

July 2011

Still life with baby Ari

(who I am missing terribly, well the grown-up version of her. Since she moved out to Chestnut Hill I have had an Ari shaped hole in my life and heart)

July 2011

Mom and me in her studio

Spring 2009

Hands, black & white

July 2011

My brief affair with the Yashica and a boy I really cared for.

If you told me in this night I would be anywhere else but in a similar moment halfway around the world with him, I would have told you to fuck off and thrown jam at you (one of my finer moments, it was homemade).  One of the [at least] 100 reasons I was literally cut out of his life.  Sometimes I hate having photographic proof of everything.  Photographs are precious blessings and sinister, spiteful curses.

Fall 2007/Spring 2008?

Bill talking last night

July 2011

(I love this photo and re-edit it soon, possibly the color verison as well, which is nice its bare bones, neautral setting. Alas, I love playing with black and white tones in a minimal setting like this, where they really live and thrive in their zones.  However the image needs a little more time and attention. These are the nights where I wish I was printing this on a medium format film strip, truly, actually controlling tones of a photograph I took with a piece of machinery, and I held its results in my hand after I sat with it in the darkest of dark, I shook it just right, handled it with care- and when you do it for years it is so satisfyinf to not need or wat t peek in the middle of the fixer stage, you waited with patience because you had to.  You waited for it to dry for maybe hours, and light sparked through it over a large table of promise.  Just now, it was only the beginning.  You and your black and white strip of plastic, off to another provate place.  If others surrounded you, it was often a sense of community- but only if they felt what you felt, aiming towards a similar goal, shared your values (and taste in music helped too)- but it never felt like competition or jealousy, not in that dark, reddish room- which thinking about that now could have been the most sinister of places.  Competetion and judgement hppened under the bright, white lights. Balance mattered there in all ways.  Beforehand, the time you spent with this tiny frame, often no larger than your hand was a series of all these decisive moments.  Everything mattered so much more. In some of these moments, that piece of plastic and you was the only thing that mattered.  Just you and this inkling of what your image might be, might mean, endless possibilities.  If you didn;t care, it showed.  I never understood people who didn’t care but decided to come anyways, wasting everyone else’s space. Taking an easy way out was obvious, there was no “auto” anything, you created your own tricks when you needed to.  Nights where that imge, that print was literally the only thing that existed in the world, that and the right atmosphere to work in) This room, after my camera itself, gave me what we crave—control. With my hands, with my fingertips, with toxicity… and whatever I could macguvyer into a burn/dodge tool from my locker.

I am so aware of how much more control we all have now, digitally.  I will be the thousandth nostalgic photographer who was schooled in the strangest transitional time where we were all forced to make more choices about aesthtics and tools than ever, and our professors opinions and up to date, ever changing knowledge on new vs. old mattered. Everything changed from my freshman year, my 2 sophmore years, my junior and senior years spread out over time.  Looking at my hard drive they handed me in 2005, I didn’t know what to do with it, or why it mattered. Years later nothing less than a fireproof box and at lest 3 copies mattered.  Things were changing all around us, it was more of a critical time than we could know- and a lot of crappy art was made, learning about how to use, handle, and give a damn about these new controls.

How did I even get here?  I should really be rediscovering old, well done photos instead of trying to fix the newer, lower quality ones. But when you catch yourself faking it with your own passion, it is a sad moment.  Losing control.

Spanish Mike

April 2011

“What Remains”

April 2011