Since I enrolled in grad school, I have somehow managed to stop photographing as much as I used to. This is very disheartening and alarming. However, what I find very interesting is how many of my friends in grad school have been experiencing the same thing. Personally, I have found it very difficult to come up with an idea for a project that I find myself interested in and passionate about. The sad thing is that at this level, photography cannot be about simply taking pictures. Now it must be about ideas, theories, and culturally relevant issues. This concern causes me to doubt every photograph that I normally would have taken, I analyze the possibility of taking the picture before actually composing and capturing the image. While this can be advantageous sometimes, I find it can also be very detrimental to the creative process.

I have found that ideas are never conceived by sitting down and consciously trying to “think,” but rather through conversation and everyday experiences. Much in the same way, good photographs or interesting photography projects are not conceived by sitting down, but rather by getting out and photographing. The natural creative process is an ebb and flow, some things work, and other things simply don’t work.

Today, for the first time since I have been in Illinois, I really enjoyed photographing. As I was driving to Wal-Mart to purchase a lawn chair and a case of Mountain Dew so I could sit on my slab of concrete on the back of my house and catch some rays (in honor of Costello and Eric), I noticed that many of the parking lots around town were completely empty due to it being Easter. Something caught me visually and I thought about photographing these spaces with the idea of a “holiday.” What is a holiday? A break from something? A respite from everyday life? It was interesting to think that on a holiday when many people are spending time with their families, the commercial centers of town were completely empty. The cars that always littered the lots of our local mall were gone, leaving a vast open landscape of colored lines and landscaped “islands.” So I photographed, and I enjoyed it. I got kicked out of the mall parking lot, but not until after I had exposed 1 roll of film. It was a good day. photos coming soon.