I don’t know what’s next. Not knowing, that gnawing ambiguity, is what I’m slowly, very slowly, coming to like. Soon, I’ll love it. A friend sent me an email the other day saying she loved the night work, but wondered how effective I’ll be in Europe. Rightly, her concern was that the light will be different, the photos less ‘archaic.’ I’m worried about that too. It may be more anodyne, less interesting, less action, just less.
I did quite a bit of work in Sydney, and by the end I needed to get out of there. It just wasn’t inspiring me to work anymore. I needed to see new things. I don’t feel like I’m done in Dhaka. There’s always something different here, something happening, something becoming. There’s a depth here that I couldn’t have imagined, even after 10,000 photos. Europe. I know all the non-shooting reasons that I’m going. But I can’t imagine what I’ll want to make a set out of.
But really I’m forgetting my own advice about creation—perhaps because it’s so unintuitive. The ideas will come from working, from the tiny little pieces of work. I have to get there and get into it. The work comes before the ideas do. Or start working, before you know what you’re working on.
Posted 2 years ago
