Monday 30 January 2012

Week 133: Wading through the subconscious.

I am both fascinated and scared that my own brain can hide things from me. It can control my memories and dreams completely separate and out of the way from my initial control. After travelling and taking photographs in places I never thought I'd see for years, I have a lot of thing running through my mind, it has changed me. The photographs act as memories and I have them engraved at the front of my mind. However, at the back of my mind I think they are doing something a little strange. I have been having dreams about the photographs I have taken, the light metering, the framing and also the subjects themselves. They are all moving around. The lighting in one of my photographs swaps with another and the people hop from one frame to another. It's the strangest set of dreams I've had in a long time. I rarely dream about my own photographs.

Daniel.



This was one of the places that kept appearing in my dreams. The Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan.

Song listening to right now: Voice of the Soul - Death

Wednesday 18 January 2012

Week 132: Prompt.

Something always urges me to do something that frightens the living daylights out of me. I think it's when I lose motivation. You know when you're feeling like there is going to be no outcome to everything you do and so, in turn, you feel as though it won't be worth doing it? I get that feeling every now and again. I think it is that very feeling that pushes me to just get back on my feet and put everything I've got into my work. So it's almost a risk, putting all your time and effort into something that may turn out to be nothing. I like that feeling, it's almost like adrenaline.

Thanks
Dan.



This was a Desert Starling, taken in Massada. I could get so close to him that I could see the reflection of my lens in his eyeball, he didn't even flinch. Nothing scared him. I'm sure I could have even picked him up. I'm not sure whether these birds are actually scared by humans getting up close to them, seeing how close we can get before they fly off or they just couldn't care less. Either way it reminds me of how I feel when I do purposely something to scare myself.

Song listening to right now: Viva Las Vegas - ZZ Top

Saturday 14 January 2012

Week 131: That place.

Sometimes I wake from a dream, realise it was just a dream and then fall back to sleep again. Very rarely, I will fall back into the same dream knowing I have been dreaming. I then have complete control over myself for a short amount of time in this dream. I've spoken about lucid dreaming before, over a year ago now but I've been experiencing it a little different recently. This time my dreams have started to involve memories. Memories of things that I would not think about in day to day life. They are almost dispositional, rather than surreal. They are memories that are ready for me to harvest through the state of dreaming. It's a strange feeling that I cannot really do much about. The thing that really gets me, is that when I'm in that place between dream and awake, I know what's coming next but I can't control myself enough to stop it from happening. I can however, completely control myself once it has happened.

D.



I made a series of portraits of people behind masks. This was a parody of the Portrait. It plays with the concept that all portraits are, in fact, masks. You can never show what a person is truly like through one photograph (or even a series of frames i.e film and cinema) it is something more than that. The irony of the Portrait is that the true portrayal is actually behind the portrait itself. So in this case I tried my best to illustrate that concept, I made a series of portraits of people trying to break through that mask. Much like a wet piece of cloth, it is almost impossible to break through, it won't suffocate you unless you struggle.

The mask is very much like that place between dream and awake that I mentioned earlier. I am in a constant struggle to control myself and break through that mask, but once I get into the dream (that place behind the mask) then I can control myself completely.

Song listening to right now: Elaborama - Everytime I Die

Sunday 8 January 2012

Week 130: Protocol.

So when all things go from bad to worse and you have to look to people, people that are important to you. I've done that recently and its given me a hell of a lot of motivation. I feel an utter sense of panic every time I realise how reckless I have been with my choices in life. I feel inferior to those that have everything planned out, those that have got themselves into a trade from a young age and focused their school, college and university choices on were they see themselves in the future. However, some of the most fascinating and inspiring people that I have met just improvised with their lives. They had the tools they needed to be able to do what they want when they want and somehow make it fit all together. Do you ever feel like you've done that? I'm sure if you have done it successfully, you would not realise it. So this idea of doing what you have to do, is not the be all and end all. I'll get to where I need to be through a combination of choices that will come to me as I go. In the world of music, my forte has always been improvisation. I have an ample amount of theoretical knowledge that lets me improvise in almost any genre. If I've got the mental tools, I can use them to get to where I need to be. Happiness is a hard thing to find and I think people can also find it separate to their place in society. Yes, you may go through this protocol of what you need to do, but running parallel to this may be the thing that makes you happy, it doesn't always have to be at the end of those aforementioned choices.

Thanks.
D.



This again was taken on the tenth 9/11 memorial. Throughout all of this woman's duties. She keeps what makes her happiest close to her, and that link to family runs completely parallel to her duties as a police officer. She keeps her duties as both a police officer and a mother running in two parallel lines, close to each other but still separate. There is a reason she's not on the other side of that barrier.

Song listening to right now: A Real Hero - Electric Youth