Altered States of Agoraphobia. Page 36 & 37.

Page 36 (left).  

I could feel it there in my heart like it was home..

I found myself in Flagstaff, Arizona, in April 2020. No one knew what was going to happen then. I’d driven from Southern California and only been out there for a couple of weeks. When the medical treatment for my back ended up being a washout, I left. I didn’t know where I was going, and I didn’t much care. I was still angry and in so much pain that I could hardly walk. Anger and pain can make a person's world small, and I was already half crazy. I knew I was close to the Grand Canyon, the road signs told me so, and I could feel it there in my heart like it was home. I just needed to stop somewhere first, a motel, to hold up for a while, to eat, sleep and perhaps even conjure up some pain relief. Besides, I had an engine check light on, and I could not risk traveling any further until I had it looked at. 

This is where I met Ed. He approached me outside the auto shop the next day and asked me for a cigarette. I was waiting for my car and it was expected to take another hour. He was friendly and high, and he felt like talking. He told me he was staying in one of the nearby motels, which had offered quarantine to those without shelter. He was up from Phoenix and had missed his ride back. He wanted to visit his sister, whom he hadn’t seen for several years, who lived in Lenexa, Kansas, where he grew up. I told him that Lenexa, Kansas was where I injured my back and where I left a year ago on a journey I was, in fact, still on.

When my car was ready, we spent the afternoon running errands together, buying cigarettes, food, and later, opiates. My pain was one-third this and two-thirds that and the other, and the drugs immediately lifted my spirits and cleared my head enough to be able to dream again. The future, which was once obscured by sciatica and betrayal, now revealed its original shape. This brief and legitimate relapse brought with it a vision of my life where those things were not part of it, and I was thankful for the respite. Later, I dropped Ed off near a busy intersection where he liked to panhandle, and before we parted, I made this photograph of him. He said I could always find him here, especially in the afternoon. I was in Flagstaff for just over a week. I looked for Ed every day but never saw him again.

Page 37 (right). 

We had to leave before the simulation began..

When I lived in Lenexa, Kansas, I made a friend who was a low-budget horror movie scream queen but worked a day job at UPS. We hung out a lot. She lived with her Doctor in a large house in a wealthy subdivision in an arrangement I could never fully understand. My friend always had to check with the Doctor before we did anything together, and then she lied about what it was we were going to be doing. Sometimes the Doctor would say yes, and sometimes the Doctor would say no. Once my friend invited me to an emergency training event at the city of Olathe’s fire department. She was there to assist the volunteers with their gory make-up applications, and I was there purely out of curiosity with my camera in hand. I don’t remember what emergency was being staged, but that morning I took photographs of a wide variety of injuries. Sadly, we had to leave before the simulation officially began, because the Doctor called and needed my friend to return home immediately, via the pharmacy, where something was always ready for her to pick up.

Altered States of Agoraphobia is available to order from Eyeshot Publishing here.

My own history of seeing..

 

Flickr, Part 2.

..and the heart of my desires.

The real mindblower about my revisit to Flickr has been the viewing of my Flickr Favorites via the slideshow function. Tonight they have been rolling for what seems like several hours and now it is getting late. The impulse to write about them is gripping, but instead the silent computer cursor winks back at me waiting for my thoughts to take shape and I must declare that I am finding it almost impossible right now to describe the deeply visceral effect they have had upon me.

3 days have passed since the last paragraph and I am now convinced these Flickr Favorites are, in fact, a detailed map of my unconscious mind, a giant self portrait sourced exclusively through other people's photographs. They are filled with my private thoughts and secret wishes for photography. All of them are beautiful, miraculous and improbable images which I could not ever manifest for myself, yet believe all of them to be true. My Flickr Favorites are where art has happened for me, where I have found myself transported and my consciousness expanded. Where the edges of myself and my knowing has been pushed out into new creative territories.

Without a doubt, with 147 desktop pages containing over 14,000 photographs, my Flickr Favorites are a super highway back into my own history of seeing and the heart of my desires. During my 5 year experience of Flickr, between 2008-2013, they represent today my visual education there. They track and log every photograph that stirred something in me. Being able to track and see one's own favorite photographs online, and to view those of contacts too, feels fundamental for a photography platform - it speaks to the photographer's personal aesthetic and taste and a lot can be learnt from this, but no other platform that I am aware of has this feature and it's a shame too.

Viewing my Flickr Favorites is like traveling through a wormhole in which I have loved becoming lost. Jumping from one contact's Favorite list to another can take an explorer to far off corners of the space, sometimes lighting places which we might have preferred stay hidden from us. Other times these portals take us to new and inspiring discoveries which resonate with our own work and enrich our everyday lives, which, at the end of the day, is what it is really all about..

My baby pictures of America..

 

Flickr, Part 1.

Chance pairings and happy accidents.

A month ago I decided to revisit my Flickr account which I abandoned 7 years ago. Rather than getting all nostalgic about what Flickr used to be like, back in the day, I’ll speak only briefly to it now and move on. My most interactive time spent at Flickr was between 2008-2013 and at that time I thought it was a lively place to be. There were some wonderful photographers working on personal projects and experimenting wildly. They were discovering lost archives and cutting their teeth out on the streets or in the deserts, making work that has since stood up to time and found its way off the screen and into our waking life. Supporting this was a community of (on the whole) generous spirits in enthusiastic discussion. I learnt a lot. It was also a boom time for self publishing and there was an explosion of pop up publishers printing all manner of books and zines or running websites, most of which have now long folded. About a foot of shelf space in my office holds a heady selection of these collaborations that I feel fortunate to have been a part of. 

I found my way back to Flickr to take a look at some of my old work. My baby pictures of America. It had been years since I’d seen them, especially together. I knew that time was ready to show me anything I might have missed about these photographs before and I responded by deleting over a thousand of them from my account, of which 500 remain. It is now very quiet here in my little corner of Flickr and all my housekeeping is done. It used to take me a couple of hours every day to catch up with the latest uploads and activity from my contacts, but now these updates have barely changed from one week to the next. Many of my contacts deleted their accounts or simply abandoned their posts years ago. A few still remain and they appear to somehow make it work for them.

Flickr does still have some of the best in-house tools I’ve found. The ability to view images at various sizes and in full-screen, with one click, is, I think, still the best way to view a photograph online (??). To have the option to also set each photo in your stream to a public or private view, is very helpful too, especially if you want to work on an edit behind the scenes, which is what I have been doing. All of my photo-series before 2013 were put together this way.

All files are cloud stored and can be downloaded in various sizes, including the originals which for me, who has always been on the move, finds this comforting. It has also been a pleasant experience for me to spend more time enjoying fewer photographs by what has essentially been by just a handful of photographers and over the last month I have gotten to know some of these photographers collected pictures more intimately than I have done elsewhere.

The photo organizers 'set to random’ button is still my favorite button of them all. I love it and I have not seen the likes of this click anywhere else. To be able to add a photo album to the organizing space and then radically re-order its sequence, continues to be a refreshing revelation of chance pairings and happy accidents. If you ever want to prize your image sequence apart and then have it shuffled up and reassembled in slot machine fashion, just to see what you’ve got going on, then this is the button for you.

Being part of Flickr again, if only low key, reminds me it is actually a really wonderful place for the curation of images. Whether it be for one’s own work or the work of others, Flickr encourages it, but more on this in the next post.