End of Innocence
(draft)

On the last Monday of the last week of September, 2002, I had endured a particularly tough day at work, suffering under the demands of first one responsibilty, then another, then another. On my way home, slumped in the seat as I was driving, I felt completely drained as I had been unable to exercise any autonomy the entire day. Even heading for home was the same as I was acting under an obligation to my family.

The sun was about 20 minutes from setting, the sky was clear, but losing color, and I was feeling desperate to regain the helm of my life, if even for a few minutes. The impulse to photograph in such situations often wells around me like surging water, but I seldom act on it, owing to my schedule or responsibilities. On this night, however, my decision to stop the car and yield to the calling was in a strange way as much a continuation of my lack of control as it was a taking of the wheel. In one sense I had to do it, and at the same time I gave myself over completely to the decision to let myself flow in the moment.

Without much of a mind as to what to photograph, I slung the car over to the side of the road, grabbed my camera bag and started walking. Knowing that my light was limited, I realized that my shooting would have to be much looser than I'm accustomed to. Therefore, no tripod, no bracketing, no fiddling with composition, exposure and focusing. In short: No thinking. If I was to release the energy that was pushing me, then my photography would have to be intuitive. This attitude had the benefit of allowing me to excuse mistakes, and transformed the purpose of the photography away from the result and rooted it in the process. The image was not the goal, rather it was the process of creating, the image being more a record of the union between myself, the subject, and cool September twilight. I made about 20 exposures before the darkness put an end to my revolution.

As I had anticipated, my preferences tempted me to reject most of the pictures based on technical considerations, mostly with regard to image sharpness. In spite of this, I enjoyed the results very much, particularly their frailty and nakednes as if they were completed photographs in states of undress. This was a terrific success for me because the purpose of the shooting was to thumb my nose at responsibility, to purposefully reject the authority of rules and their oppression, effectively stripping myself of their covering. The physics of photography continued to act according to law, but my mind had kicked itself free of the weight of obligation, at least for those twenty minutes.

Several days later I returned to gather a few more images, trying as I did to find the same attitude that had first motivated me, and trying not to be overly concerned with technical matters. Some 10 months after that, I tried again, and understood that I could never photograph in this same location with the same objectives.

For the technically minded, these images were photographed with a Hasselblad ELX and either a 60mm, 80 mm, or 150 mm lens. A 16mm extention tube was used on some shots. Film used was either Ilford Delta 400, or Kodak TMX 100, or TMY 400. Processing was in D-76.