Stuck between the bookends of my habitual existence are photographs that articulate my life, often with ghost eyes staring back at me in my nightmares. They fill up scrapbooks either showing me doing nothing or showing me leaving nothing undone. I don't shave anymore and I don't smoke cigarettes but I don't hate them either. Death is a cage of silence to fall back on like a second job where I find things to do to keep busy. My life is really very simple and simplicity is the map for my sacred tour. It's not a very complicated tour. It begins as a numbing sensation in my fingers and goes up my arm until it scrapes the flavor of blandness off my lips. Since I don't believe in God I don't go to church and I don't go out much either. I don't think one thing has anything to do with the other but it just happens that I stay at home most of the time as much as I can. When you think about it, home's the best place for me to be for the good of everybody. Anxiety comes in all forms and sizes. It never used to bother me. I used to crave it but now I don't. I kicked the hard stress. Now I go to the gym, the liquor store and the farmer's market to smell the farmer's daughter. I go down town Nashville to take photos or else I stay home and make love to Nico until I go insane from alcoholism or we die in each other's arms from some other pleasure. Life is sooooo complete.
Today I thought about the challenge. JPG says: "My Precious stories are JPG's version of product reviews, where members write about their favorite and most precious piece of equipment. Tell us about a product or accessory you use and love. It can be new or old, a hand-me-down or the hottest thing on the market. A flash, a lens, a camera... YOUR precious......." OK. I thought about this in the steam room. I think more freely when I sweat. It burns up brain cells and washes the dead ones down the shower drain. I'm going to use a broad brush to paint the JPG guidelines because when I get an idea I'm lucky if it'll be a good one. (Please note: I wanted to submit this story to the JPG theme, but apparently it doesn't fit the parameters of its intentions and I'm unable to make that contribution. Lucky you, here it is anyway.)
Just exactly what is my "precious"? My precious what? What piece of equipment is so important its absence would deprive me of gratification? What product or accessory can I not live without, such that without it I'd merely become a male prostitute with a beard who'd give anything to live a glamorous life in order to get it? Tough questions utterly unbelievable; maybe there are no answers. Efforts to know the answers often kill it. Suddenly a silent sweat drips from my armpits down my stomach, to my legs and down to my feet. An idea, maybe an answer, hit me like a shot of chilled whiskey. There I was in a neighborhood bar drinking again and listening to sadly monotonous jazz. I remembered what it was all about: survival! That's IT! My "piece of equipment" is my impulse to survive! It's the negative of the positive side of life! It's not about kicking the habit of self-deception and self-enabling. It's clearly about photography as an accessory to a daily practice of surviving without resisting, without illness, without spraying my head with glue to keep my brains inside and without having to stumble down the stairs to the men's room. Survival is an image exposed from one world, developed from the negatives of another! Photography is an accessory of survival, plain and simple.
Survival isn't a game to see who or what wins or loses the most, or the least. It's not a game played really well or really badly. It might be a game in the long run, but in the short run it's not about struggling to stay alive to avoid dying just to see the sun rise one more day or to see the full moon shine another month. Survival isn't frustration besieged by circumstances fighting to breathe. Survival as I see it isn't about putting up with, or settling to be, a bored, sterilized, quarantined contradiction without life support, living on antibiotics and narcotics. (By the way, have you ever noticed that the best things you can say about narcotics are the worst things you can say about people?)
Survival is not a choice between eating out or being hungry. It's not about sleeping late on the weekend so we can sleep longer on a weekday. That's not surviving; that's a fatality and a futility. That's airplane food, hospital food, botched blood tests in the middle of the night when you don't know if you'll live to see tomorrow, but you probably will, and of course you always do for a while. Real and powerful survival from an artistic underground sub-culture point of view, as I think of it, is an existence into a future. It's a function of prosperity. It's not conquering life by being separate from it and paranoid as if we're strangers suspicious of it; it's overcoming a tolerance for the mediocre by absorbing and including weakness and flaws, and then transforming that into something simple and easy to experience. It's not defending ourselves against the unknown; rather, it's assimilating the unknown into our imagination.
Survival as a piece of equipment shapes photography. It points to artistic levels, knowable and unknown. Life is experienced through images. Life becomes an accessory of survival itself as an image, such that photography is a child of the affluent. Through photography we index our survival as individuals. Photography shows us that we're sexual beings as resilient in community as we are elastic in the unified field of a greater humanity. The products and accessories used (and photographed) by our intuition for survival are the impressions of all living things surviving as universe, spirit and infinity. Ultimately, photography represents the survival of energy, space, time and material. Using digital cameras and film, these representations eventually become self-portraits. They become images of men and women living within intimate relationships outside all barriers of sexuality and they all have their own stories. These are visual documented histories of the migration of whole generations preserving the memories of friends and lovers, young and old. Through photographs we capture survival of unpredictabe and volatile crowds and their protests. We see the survival of panoramic landscapes and the vast, unending beauty of nature. Photography is all about survival and if you don't get that you might be missing something.
JPG described the "Precious" challenge in terms of writing a review of one's favorite equipment, accessory or product. I thought long and hard about this at the spa in the steam room. I reduced the idea down to its most minimal simplicity: photography is an accessory to survival.
I want to clear up what survival is and what it isn't. Survival isn't a choice between life and death. Death isn't surviving, so that's not a choice. If you're not already dead, then living (breathing) is the default condition. That's not a choice, either. So living or dying, either one or both, is not surviving.
What survival is as I'm considering it has to do with a fundamental impulse to exist by will, or the will to power, as Nietzsche thought of it. Survival is the will to power on different levels of self-expression of life and the will to express existence with authority. Survival is a driving force. It's the source of creativity, curiousity, power and the will.
We put this insight into several areas of life every day, every time we take photographs. As photographers there are five areas of life that we can photograph, five out of eight. They are (1) self-portraits of ourselves or portraits of other individuals. This includes the nuances and atmospherics that surround us, our histories and stories of ourselves surviving as individuals. (2) Men and women surviving as a form of relationships, survival in terms of sexual intimacy, lovers, and children who are products of intimate sexual activities of survival. (3) Groups of people surviving (self-expressing) as members of communities, networks, familes and larger centers, but smaller than "mankind", thriving and interacting as groups. (4) We photograph movements and migrations of human generations in time on a global scale. This is survival as humanity, inhabitants and occupants of a planet. This includes the survival of cities, towns and dwelling places. (5) And, finally, we photograph survival as nature, with landscapes and the panorama of living things in relationships to biological organisms, plants, animals and the effect their survival has on us.
Those are five major areas of life's interests that we photograph. I think every photo can be placed, liberally, somewhere in those five categories. Except for scientists and satellites with advanced space-age technologies, we haven't photographed (6) the universe, (7) the spirit or (8) the infinite. But five major areas of life itself are available to us to photograph. We are not separate from them. We are not strangers to them. They are not outside of us. They are where we put our survival. They are where we plant our survival. Where we live and promote our existence.
Every photo we take, every time we snap the shutter, it comes from an impulse for survival. To survive not being separate from it. We survive by being intimate with... and at One with... these five identities. Survival as life is common to all of us regardless of what we photograph or the quality of the work, or what we know or don't know. Photography is driven by impulses to survival and survival drives us together, and holds us together, as people. Every photo we take reinforces and strengthens our claim on survival as individuals. As sexual beings. As members of groups. As parts of greater unified humanity. As a co-equal with all of nature.
What started out as a joke about knowing something about photography, has become a truth for me that I cannot avoid. It stares me in the face everyday. Everytime I take a photograph I see it: "If you know the difference between a bus stop and and f/stop, you already know too much."
Survival is very simple and uncomplicated. The easier a photo can be experienced, the more profound is its emotion. The simpler the emotion, the more authentic the image, the more complete the experience of survival. At least it is for me.
Anyway, this whole thing was written in context of that challenge, "My Precious" which for one reason or another didn't work out. So if this is too philosophical for some of you, too bad.
