My printer rollers rolled today. It’s been 6 or more months without printing. I closed my little print shop which was doing okay, well enough to cover the costs and most of the time, but not well enough to devote your life to so…
I sorta lean toward devotion.
maximal in all things, despite deeply wanting balance.
I’m still not shooting. I’m still thinking I’m probably not a photographer anymore. Despite owning half the cameras in the free world. Despite packing up my bag for a typical spring sunset chase. Despite feeling nearly nothing about the value of photos in 2024.
I had this dream last night. Some girl, unknown, sat on my lap and hugged me and she smelled so good my entire body came alive. even the dead parts. even the parts which long ago fell. I woke to a deep ache to smell that random dream girl’s hair.
it’s been jangling around inside me like a memory of an old love all morning. walking askew with too-quickly paced steps to nowhere. anywhere but here. wherever-she-is. and all that noxious existential biological bullshit which btw, has nothing to do with me, prompted a little fit of unabashed cleaning.
cleaning, during which, i unearthed another aching. This photo printed nearly perfectly in 8x10. Aching for how dumb we all were in December of 2019 when Marla and I holed up at a fancy hotel with my street photos built into the lobby wall and made this photo in the morning after she snuck out and brought me back breakfast. Aching for how simple life felt back then and you all know I’m only truly firing when I’m missing something. The Elegiac sort.
So lovely. But I made no printing notes for it 2 years ago when I made it. Or, they’ve been subsumed by the A.I. revolution. Fodder for some abstract poem about toning explained like your 5 years old.
5 hours later I still have no print in hand.
so i had to miss marla too. despite not believing in missing people. or missing things. or missing.
all the fucking same.
Marla is just catching emotional strays. It had nothing to do with her either. Honestly, I think the girl in the dream, maybe, was a french girl I knew once, who sat with me by a fountain and the world unfurled before us. Everything was possible.
The girl in the dream smelled like everything was possible.
again. that my stupid body thinks girls or any of this is important is just, you know, the gods having a good laugh at us.
but my printer, which is a real thing, a real tangible, complex device for making realities out of tiny little droplets of ink, well, that not working is just the printer companies having a laugh at us fools who think we can self print.
fools who think anything can smell like possibility through the sour egg smell of fine printer paper.
fools, of the sort, who quit. but you know, can’t quite quit anything.
Printers are made for people who like, whether they like it or not, to suffer.
I don’t like it, but I can’t reasonably argue suffering isn’t just how I work. Most of the time. And so printing and I, and living in a small town filled with happily married young mothers, well, we’re hand and glove.
You stack your miseries.
the clogged heads. such a profound metaphor for photographer’s who don’t photograph. Lovers who don’t love. sensitive robot hearts that refuse to feel.
I did stop to wonder on how I got away from printing, and it was startling to realize I was in a sort of mourning for it. I’d carried around this romantic notion of getting old and just making beautiful prints and selling them and having that be a life a person could live because sometime in the early 2000s I watched a documentary about a photographer who did just that and that sun-kissed asshole had his very own creek running behind his A-frame print store out on his own plot of forest. the nerve of people to even exist like that.
in the 2000s before the internet taught us to envy and hate everyone not us, we foolishly made heroes of people who succeeded doing what we wanted to do then even more foolishly we admired them and tried to model our lives on them. Now, because modernity has taught us proper social etiquette a gang of us would drag his ass on twitter till he went away and probably some freedom fighters would burn that A-Frame down. Fuck you for winning the lottery I refused to buy a ticket for.
honestly, the nerve.
but anyway. I had that dream and had it summarily corrected by the reality of scale and the reality of you have to be likeable on some level to get a following large enough to just have the three poles for an A-Frame let alone the whole building and a creek. Likability isn’t a life skill I picked up. So my print sales were all to people who like difficult people. You run out of those pretty damn fast.
I spent an inordinate and entirely irrational amount of time making my winter box. I perfected each piece, one after the other. It might be the most attention to detail I ever put into anything in my life and well, they didn’t sell. I’m obligated to say that’s fine (see notes above about being likeable) but it wasn’t fine at all internally. It was crushing somehow and I just swept it aside and let it rot my love of printing from the inside. But quiet like. that’s the best kinda self damage. Where just sweep it away and let it fester till you pop one day.
so yeah, I realized I was mourning this silly dream for a while. A convincing idea of a future thats near impossible for all but the luckiest to achieve. That part is actually okay. You gotta make dumb dreams and lie to yourself about how likely you are to achieve them. if you don’t no amount of coffee or sweet smelling girls will keep you going.
So the desire to feel prints in my hands again must suggest i can take off the black clothes and see what’s what outside the blinders of mourning silliness (but carefully never looking it in the eye. I hope you’re taking notes).
I’d say I digress but honestly I digressed about 8 paragraphs ago.
So, this stupid god damn near perfect print in lowly 8x10 where you can barely see her nipple hairs. Well. I had this quaint thought about how I should print it 16x20 and plop it in one of the 4 big frames that have sat by my door since i dragged them in 2 years ago, unused, reminding me to you know make prints.
clogged heads and noxious possibles and aches and whiling away the day then digressing all over your inbox and I’m not really any closer to that goal.
What must be progress is being willing to print a large image of Marla. I went through a period where I removed, one by one, the many images littering my home of her. Again, nothing to do with her, or me and her, our us. Just it felt like I had accidentally built a shrine of some kind and I’m not the sort to visit shrines. or, ostensibly live in one.
The shrine came together a piece at a time. organically. Buying a polaroid of her to help a fellow photographer, a gifted workprint of her from another, a couple of drawings she made on lazy mornings when we’d sit around and talk, fighting off the winter chill. A painting off a local artist. Then I got into printing and since she’s the model I’ve made the most photos of it stands to reason she’s going to be the subject of the most prints.
before you know it you’re simping in a shrine to a person you dated for a year a million years ago and it’s uncomfortable. you can’t untangle your work and your history. so forget your work was the thinking. just like maybe put up a print of a nice fucking hoarfrost covered tree for a change.
so I did.
and then I stumbled, all emotionally agape, onto that godforsaken print and wanted to see it every day for a time. large. in a frame that sat mute and stupid by my door for two years smelling of possibility.
thwarted, as usual by my printer, instead I write you this now.
hello old friends. hello girl who sat with my by the fountain while time unravelled before us.
spring is nearly here. the seedlings climb out of the dark wet soil. the grasses turn deep green. I see patches of green hills when i stumble over half awake for coffee.
it won’t be pretty but we will get there.
That is a beautiful photo. It deserves to be framed and hung, but I get if you rather don’t hang it up.
I hope spring will help you to see the world a little less dark. And maybe even will make you grab one of your cameras to chase whatever you need to chase and photograph it!