The untitled photograph, i dont know if that's a title or not. "Untitled".....is that a title? i'm at home with the darker images, the darker places, spaces that dont seem to have a purpose or a point: a bottle of water, a pen, a coffee cup, shoelace, cell phone, check book, broken glass, empty shelf, man standing in the middle of the street, woman eating fish, women buying clothes, men combing their hair, sunsets, rain, jazz, children sleeping, babies screaming, old couple walking, drunks in a bar, late night crowds, cops, hotels, old streets, taxis, crowded freeways, flat tires, boredom, hospitals, drugs, suicide, wind, cold, dry heat, wrong telephone numbers, politicians, magick, cats, poetry, chinatown markets, crime, clocks, sex, old age, death, religion....these are the untitled inspirations for untitled photographs.
What i want to do is photograph what there is in front of me, not just the obvious visual image but the stuff that it's made of, the substance of the stuff behind it, around it, inside and the stuff that puts it together that i cant see but i can feel it. like jazz. like jazz improvization. i dont care anymore if the photo is a photo of people and their heads are in the picture, or their feet, or whatever. i dont care if the buildings are straight or round, or upside down, or if the people are upside down. what matters to me is the atmosphere of the photo, the cloud that hangs around the obvious image, the intangibles, the transcendental, the undefined, the lost, forgotten, the stuff with a beat, with a jazz beat that goes on forever. anyway, i want my photos to have some kind of poetic substance to them that goes beyond the image and hits something i cant see, but something that's present, a presence.
Low-tech equipment works better for me, at least so far, to get the look and feel of a darker, dreary, more dismal, gloomy side of life that's out there that i like to photograph. high-tech digital and film cameras are too clean and sharp and crisp for what i want to feel. recently i had to exchange my 5-yr old camera phone for a newer model because the old phone finally broke down. the camera wouldnt work at all. i hated to let it go. i havent used the new one yet for pictures. it's best to take photos with a camera phone in congested places, big cities, crowded places, dirty streets, alleys, kitchens, cafes, sidewalk cafes, coffee shops, gutters, crossing busy streets....it's best to use a camera phone for fast, spontaneous photos that are done in secret, hidden from view, where i can get close-up face shots of people and they dont know it. there's something about getting a natural expression on someone's face, a real expression, a real emotion that's unguarded and not safe..there's something exciting and fulfilling about it when i get the photo home and there's nothing to do to it, no processing, no manipulation, no alteration. i like it anyway....and it works good for self-portraits. i dont know anything better for self-portraits than a low-tech camera phone.
So i loaded up on morphine, hydrocodone and clonazepam and john coltrane's "love supreme" and went out to find my self-portrait. i had to get dressed finally, i couldnt walk around the house or outdoors completely naked forever. i got dressed and made a drink of soda water, juice and ice cubes. i probably should go to sleep and maybe i will, but something has happened to me since this medical interruption, this "untitled" medical portrait photography, has laid itself upon me, since it laid its hands upon me like a priest, a madman type priest dancing in the black shadows of a life and death photo of incompletion, fear, the scars of uncertainty and the flesh of my body.
i've gotten really interested in the untitled meaning of narcissism. i think of it as self-love, self-absorption, self-consumption. maybe it's because my body was so ripped apart with pain and drugs, medications that killed every bacteria i carried around. i started seeing everything in terms of my body: where it was, what it was doing, how it looked, what it ate, like it was something separate from "me", which it is, like the Self and the body. i started dressing it up and weighing it everyday, and feeding it only so much small portions and cleaning it, washing it, showering it, brushing its hair like it was a child's doll, putting it in warm clothes, walking it around, showing it off. i started showing it off like it was an appealing trophy. appealing to me. attractive to me and me to it. i started listening to jazz on my headphones in my hospital bed, really loud piped in my ears, and i guess i flipped on a switch and went out thru my ears or my nose or my eye balls and sat on the edge of the bed playing with my feet, rubbing my legs, massaging my legs and photographing them with my low-tech camera phone. i couldnt stop. i was addicted to it. still am.
And everything just went faster and louder. and it was untitled. especially the drum solos. late at night there was this street light that came into the hospital room, thru the curtains, in between the curtains, right above the heater that never worked, right thru the window that i kept open just a crack so I'd make up stories, stories i'd get to say what they mean. Stories of narcissism that came from inside and outside the window passing by where it became a dwelling place where i could hear hard jazz for hours: the street light that pulled infection out of me, it's attraction that i felt magnetism with my body when it pushed out of me it's street light shape of the forbidden and the reckless, the beautiful, forgotten and things better left ignored. But it doesnt matter now. the point is, i'd lay in bed under this thin brown blanket with a sheet and the street light would light up my little area of the room just enough so i could see my feet, my legs, my arms....and i'd lay there and write, scribble in my journal and get out my camera phone to take self-portraits in the darkness with enough light to make sense. i started walking around and taking pictures. i'd go to the bathroom and get next to the mirror and take photos that would be untitled. sideways photos of my head, my face, my hair, my neck, my chest...anything that would take my mind off where i was and what i was doing. all this before the nurses would come in to take blood or hook me up to an IV drip, or whatever. it was dark but not completely. there was something warm and comfortable about it now that i think about it.
every photo i took became a self-portrait no matter what it was. i could take a photo of a bus stop and it would be a self-portrait. i could take a photo of a marketplace in china town and it would be a self-portrait. every photo was a self-portrait. the photos i took at the hotel even the ones that were blurry and didnt come out were self-portraits, even more so because they were blurry and werent any good. photos that were too dark were self-portraits. i became consumed with this experience of being material, being the substance of everything around me, being the energy and the mass and the electricity of everything that was made, of everything was made out of me, out of my body and my mind. i became possessed with the experience of being in all things, but not like spiritual gratification, more like sexual transference, or a sexual postponement of satisfaction, located in everything, not only located there but made out of it, made in it, from it, made within and without it.
i took photos of homeless people and those were self-portraits. i started taking photos of myself in mirrors, in windows, as a shadow walking down a street or up against a wall. it didnt matter what it was, or if it was even music, the music was a self-portrait. and it worked the other way, too....a photo of me was a photo of something else, someone else, somewhere else. a photo of my hands was a photo of anybody's hands. and there was sexual energy in the hair on my arm, my legs were sexual portraits of energy that touched everything around me, touched me in a conversation with the world. the more photos i took, the stronger the conversation became, the louder the words, the more the communication started to scream at me, or me screaming at it. and it was all untitled. none of it had any purpose. none of it made any sense. and my self-portraits became the essence of everything i photographed.
