Need To Look
Saturday. Tired yesterday and today. I don't seem to be able to go to bed and shake it off by taking a nap. Just tired. The tired of the ages, of the aged, of the terminally fried. A veritable cinder, the residue of an ill chosen direction in life that led to a job on the eight to five treadmill of a large corporation here in Oakland. How did that happen? To me? There are other, less happy kinds of tired, I suspect, but we don't want to know about them until it's much too late. This amazingly sunny day in Oakland.
I drove nearby to an artist's loft complex to look at some studio space that's available for renting by the hour. Nice space. The price is right, at least to try it once or twice. I arranged a three hour session with a model to shoot some test shots: portraits, extreme close-ups, digital and film, different kinds of light. These studio lights that take up most of the space in my living room came packed in carrying cases which I still have stacked in a closet. I'm almost curious to see if they all fit back inside.
I've been threatening to do this for a long time. The minute I committed to the session I started having ideas about what might be interesting to shoot. I'm realizing this hobby might get more expensive than I imagined. Then I thought about my early days in the underground press, how the artists and publishers managed to survive. There's a similar scene here for photographers and models and makeup artists, probably much larger than it ever was for something as esoteric as underground comix. Maybe I just need to look.
|
