I’m waiting for my clothes to dry. Jeans take a very long time to completely dry, and when they aren’t completely dry you put them on and the pockets are slightly damp, which then translates into a cold and wet feeling on your legs. I don’t like it, so I will wait for my jeans to dry. I am heading down to Cobden once my clothes dry to put up posters for the small town documentary exhibition. The opening is this Monday, November 13 at 5-7pm on the second floor of the Student Center at SIUC. I encourage all of you who read this blog…(all 3 of you) to come out to the opening. It will be a festive atmosphere, complete with overpriced cheeseballs and some sort of colored punch. Oh, and there will a lot of photographs too. We have 12 people in the class this semester, and each person will be display 10 - 12 photographs, so it will be a pretty big show. Come out and see some of the work that I’ve been doing this semester. I would also like to thank my good friends from high school that have been reading my blog religiously to keep an eye on my saga in Illinois. Their devotion has been truly inspiring, and their readership has been what helps me wake up each morning and tackle the day. A special thanks goes out to my devoted readers in the lone star state, each of whom has been following my blog more closely than their own lives.

Small Town Documentary Exhibition Opening
SIU Student Center
November 13, 2006 5-7 PM

The show will be up until December 10, so if you can’t make the opening, come by and see the work at your convenience.

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.

I am currently working a new photo project that is attempting to visually articulate the relationships between online virtual communities and traditional communities. I will be posting new images very soon, probably tomorrow or the next, as I am waiting to get my negatives back from the lab. Some of my initial ideas were to photograph public spaces of traditional, rural communities such as parks and town centers and introduce digital references such as a television or computer monitor. I am now dealing with the issue of isolation that virtual communities are meant to dispel, but in reality seem to perpetuate through isolating the online user within their home or apartment. I am visually investigating this through a series of diptychs that show the subject in their home at their computer, and a formal portrait that is taken outside their home and within their community. I�??m looking forward to getting some feedback on the images/project�?�.it is very much in its infancy stages, but I will be presenting it at my first year review in a month, so I would like to have it be as complete as possible by then�?�..I�??m looking for feedback from my photo friends�?�(you know who you are) and from anyone that is involved in the virtual community�?�ie�?�myspace, facebook, online forums. stay tuned for images!

I’m leaving tomorrow to attend the national Society for Photographic Education conference in Chicago. I still haven’t started packing and I haven’t read any of my articles for my class at 9:30 AM, not to mention the five page paper that is supposedly due tomorrow that I haven’t started, oh well, thats life. I’ve been grading photo 1 midterms all day and I’m exhausted…looking at 220 photos from undergraduates can be a very monotenous practice. Anyways, I’m looking forward to the conference, I’m sure we all learn about new digital technologies and how to manage the balance of a traditional photographic education with the new digital theories of education. Or more specifically, how traditional darkroom education practices are out of date and should be completely replaced with digital. yeh, its kinda sad to see where photographic education is heading, especially with the huge push for inter-disciplinary programs that seem to look down on specialization and mastering of one medium. Now we can all learn how to be mediocre at everything and good at nothing.