Now that I’m a few weeks into looking back at a decade’s worth images to find ‘the best’ twenty shots for my portfolio, I see a distinct shift in the way in which I’ve used the camera over time.
I’m working backwards, and have 2011’s images open behind my browser window as I write this. I’ve completed reviewing what I’ve shot this year. I’m deliberately leaving iPhonography out of the mix - at least for now, and solely for the sake of my own sanity.
Thinking back to my earliest ‘serious’ shots, those were images about moving a viewer’s eye through a two-dimensional plane: the turn of a shadow, the lines of a subject, the direction of frozen motion, the geometry of abstraction: ‘pure photography.’
Looking back from the present through the beginning of 2011, the images are less pure photography and more about the use of color and space as pieces of a symbol that can only be completed when juxtaposed with other images.
These symbols, or more accurately ‘signifiers,’ seem to be about life in the 21st century: living in suburbia, the reality of ‘a smaller, more productive workforce,’ living constantly in a state of war, accepting the perceived threat of deadly terrorism as a normal part of everyday life.
