nyc journal : Graeme Mitchell

NYC Journal 49, w/ a partial consideration on the “why” of any one picture

It is mostly a desire, an attraction, something that has-to-be-had, and not logical at all – not initially at least - no, rather, gut level, very fundamental…not any different than say sexual attraction or moral conviction. Though, it’s more muddled than that, less intact if you will. B/c the process is something that is at times fought for with great stress, but at other times something that wells up uncontrollably and spills-over. So it is a balance of opposites. If the moment was a man, he’d be deeply meditative while shuddering with a mania, he’d be both courageous and meek, loving and loathing…all the while brimming with a deep conviction that what is happening is necessary. Not in a sanctimonious way, not at all, but most certainly in a stubborn way.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

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NYC Journal 48, and 1 plus 1

B/c it is seems to fit the pattern of how everything is here right now: palpable disconnect. It’s terrible in many ways…maddening actually. When I watch people on the street, on the subway, sitting on the park benches, driving their cars, living life, following the traced lines that seem to have been set out long before them, when I watch this it makes no sense; they’re all unfinished; they’re fragmented outlines that were never put in order. It’s as though a fog has settled over that which is usually inferred, that which is usually taken for granted. I don’t know when one plus one didn’t equal two anymore, but I’m not confident it does. It’s like we’re on a deep superlative bender, but without the feeling good, just the psychological tremors and quakes and underpinnings of disaster…this could be a matter of projecting…but I don’t think so. I’m not getting this across very clearly, am I? But, listen, it’s has me worried. Even these simple little pictures, this record of someday what was, seem to have become slippery, so to speak, as if they’re without reason. My only reaction is resistance, a push to take them out to some other limit. B/c sometimes they’re all I can hold onto. The continued study of a ____, at whichever end of the spectrum it exists. You’d think it would exist at some end, right? That it’s a sort of maximum. Doesn’t strike me as something that would be subtle.

photo: © Graeme Mitchell 2008

Filed under nyc journal, still & 'scape work

NYC Journal 47

Finally time to get back on those grit-dusted-streets, back to itchin’ that itch, back to not backing off.

Shoot the lights out, as my good friend Garett suggests.

photo: © Graeme Mitchell 2008

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NYC Journal 46, and characters

My room faces the Hudson and some nights the wind comes across hard and cuts in and through my windows and howls at a pitch you can’t imagine until you’ve heard it for yourself, seems like hell’s own machinery, and its cold rubbing up against the kind hiss plus drip-drip-drip heat of my old steam radiator. Kind of ominous and it re-inspires brooding thoughts from earlier today that people are all characters, types, prearranged narratives…old news, which I guess Shakespeare covered centuries ago and Foucault decades ago, but still the consistency and predictability of said characters is stunning. We are stereotypes. We are cliches. We’re not, despite what has been suggested to us, very unique at all.

Honest to God this disappointments me as much as it does anyone. Inspiring contempt and compassion at the same moment, the thought is surprisingly remorse, and rightfully so, but there’s more to it b/c then after all I think there’s the capability of one, even while understanding that their entire being is completely obvious, to at some point muster some authentic action, to create some new thing, to manage out of their fragmented self an entirely distinctive new fragment…something new to add to the pool of fragments – ad infinitum. And, this, I suspect can happen on large and small scales, like little tremors or like fundamental alteration of the paradigm.

The thing of it is, the point is, at the end of the day, history or gawd or some memory of reckoning, these forces will only remember acts, not intentions.

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

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NYC Journal 45, postcards

More postcards to you; imagine them stamped with bold yellow comic font “Greetings from New York City!”

photo: ©Graeme Mitchell 2008

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NYC Journal 44, and a letter to you

It’s been so very linear here lately, with hairy heads down, with seriously forged lines of direct direction, with every motion seeming to be endued with an ineradicable notion of progress. Eyes and hearts and lives are set on that glittering goal, that green light manifesting distant across the bay, burning like a cold soft brutal gem. Naturally, you can imagine that all disruptions are frowned upon; relaxation and imagination are intent-full…inefficiency at some point even became efficient…still, sometimes, even with that, I stop strange on the corner, like a rock dropped in a fast shallow stream…and when I look close a heavy thing fills my chest as I see most self-awareness – of which there’s plenty – smothered out buy a mix of obsession, hope, and a group-wide conviction that the purpose is absolute. You know, I can’t help but think this momentum is not innate; think that there’s the possibility of a whole lot being tremendously let down at some point… A student of history might know that this movie’s been played before, or might not…I don’t know. Yet, we manage to elude or maybe reconcile disappointment, b/c what is innate is the ability and skill to convince ourselves of anything to satiate our basic motives. For good and bad.

Anyway, the point I wanted to tell you is that I considered our savior and our ruin probably reside in equivalent qualities. Hope you’re well.

photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008

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NYC Journal 43, and sightseeing

Sight-seeing, or gleaming artifacts of not-so-soon-history. Who knows?

photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008

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NYC Journal 42

photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008.

photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008.

photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008.

photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008.

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NYC Journal 41

photo: © Graeme Mitchell, 2008.

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NYC Journal 40, and a note

Rarely do I talk about the process of work; attempting to seems full of fallacy, but, recently, I tried to explain to a good friend my discomfort towards people’s assumptions when I photograph on the street. If I’m lucky I am supposed a tourist, but more often I fear the presumed role of colonizer, in regards that I sense heavily the assumption of exploitation – and the hate of some reactions can’t be underestimated…it can leave an awfully miserable taste in my mouth. But there is little I can do to share the imperative that I do this with a unimaginable amount of compassion; nor to share that attempt to recognize universality in the harrowing despotism of the day in and out; nor, furthermore, to share a glimpse at a pursuit of a truth. As this is what it amounts to for me on some inordinate yet fundamental levels. Sure, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so to speak, but if this aphorism is speculative then I refuse it on a personal moral level.

Maybe it’s more simple to understand this through another conversation I had with another friend, an older photographer, when he warned me in realizing projects of these kinds; he chuckled in tones full of terrifying nihilism that he had known a photographer years and years ago who similarly photographed the street in NYC and had subsequently lost his mind and ended up being committed, to end up I think dieing alone and crazy in some sordid fashion that you’d usually associate with a man broken by war or likewise.

This, I thought to myself, was very easily imaginable.

Filed under nyc journal, technique/process

NYC Journal 39

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NYC Journal 38

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NYC Journal 37: midtown

In those irregular opening-ups of space and sky in midtown winter’s pall is heavy on the building tops and piling thick and brown and ominous on the horizon of 5th ave looking north and glowing like a theater set gorgeous with the low sun looking south all of it revealing not aggrandizing but outlining true the immensity of this city the girdles of glass and steel wrapping the spindles of iron and stone saw-toothing the horizon above the avenues and streets stretched into the haze of an old Dutch master and below even the ground belches and shakes and spews its own breaths of chthonic redolence and amongst this most noticeable of all are the small silhouettes of coats and hats moving without waver or end or start for that matter lighting cigarettes turning abrupt to and fro zig and zag talking loud and quiet hello goodbye shifting and rattling and pounding and grabbing and hunching lots of hunching the afraid and the more afraid the greed the hate the hope all in a dance that is based equally on reason as on unreasonableness but for all the affronting of this place this place where love is rare bears neither question nor answer neither opposition nor allegiance in itself but simply is and simply functions so floating in and out of it and realizing it as spectacle or machine or necessity doesn’t matter at all but what does count is the lone and the summation of individuals struggles and remnants that remain in the guts heart minds of people at any given instant amidst the confrontation of it all with this place I suppose.