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.

Smoking can orientate in periods of uncertainty..

 

After driving backwards in time for one year I am now standing on the very same spot from which I left, but this time I am in someone else’s present. I pat down my pockets looking for a lighter and I feel like I am asleep and dreaming. I exist in a semi-permanent state of soft astral projection nowadays which confuses things for me sometimes, especially if I have just woken up, which I think I might just have. The person I am standing with reaches into their jacket pocket and hands me a lighter. It's green. I light the cigarette and my blurred outline sharpens up suddenly then snaps into focus as coordinates lock onto my location. I have always maintained that smoking can orientate in periods of uncertainty and in the duration of smoking one you can often get an accurate idea of where you are in space. Inhale, hold, look around, exhale and repeat until all the data is in..

The epiphanies of my gloom..

 

 The Tarot (process) #3

Ever since my first contact with tarot cards, I have felt a strong connection to them and they have led me on a journey of insight and inspiration which has taken me far from their original teenage occult appeal. Their influence has reached deep into me and over time become part of what is now down there in the epiphanies of my gloom. Each time my focus has returned to them, it is like a new discovery with alternate universe revelations and filled with brand new mysteries. These cards have grown up with me, in real time, like a sister, the countryside or that feeling like I’m being watched. I see them now in my vertical photographs and I understand everything is all shuffled together into one.

Someone else’s present and my ultimate unknowing..

 

 The Tarot (some background) #2

Once upon a time, a friend of mine thought that he had a cursed pack of Tarot cards and he asked me if I could help him to dispose of them, one card at a time. Simply throwing them away or burning them was not gonna cut it for him, so I agreed to meet up and divide the deck. He told me the best way to break the hex would be to shuffle and then deal out the pack between us and then for each of us to relocate every card separately from one another, somehow, out there in the world. This was to be done in a deliberate and mindful manner as possible and 4 months later, just before New Years Eve, my half was gone. I was 17 years old then, about to turn 18 and it all sounded like a cool idea at the time.

The Tarot cards were Alister Crowley's Book of Thoth (above). A visually striking deck, layered with dense symbolism and beautifully painted by Lady Frieda Harris and published in 1944. I had possession of half, which was around 39 cards and between September and December I found places for them in my world to be discovered by others. At times I felt like a reverse pickpocket as I slipped them into the coat pockets of strangers on the streets. I hid a few in library books here and there and put one inside a Bible on the pulpit in a church. I put the Death card into a bottle and threw it into the sea. I stuck the Hermit up in a phone box next to the call girl cards. I gave the Ace of Wands to a child to run and show their parents and I attached The Chariot card to the collar of a dog on fetch. I left The Sun at the top of a monkey puzzle tree in my local park, where I used to sit and read. These are just a few examples that I remember as I write this.

Looking back on this experience I now consider it a kind of esoteric introduction to an awareness of my own perception with an attention that I cannot remember ever giving to it before. It was a practical lesson in aligning (or assigning) the universal symbols of the tarot with that of my own psyche and in turn with the world around me, before pot and psychedelics entered the scene, making everything all about them. Maybe it was because of the hex, but I took the task seriously and I carefully considered each card before committing it to someone else’s present and my ultimate unknowing.