http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/arts/design/paul-graham-and-seizing-the-everyday-moments.html?_r=2
“Stare,” wrote Walker Evans, the canonical 20th-century photographer. “It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare; pry; listen; eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
What do i know? i need to look and stare and look at more.
“Boredom is part of my work. I accept it and embrace it.” He was describing the off-handed concentration with which he looks at the normal flow of everyday activity and documents it in narrative sequences.
i dont feel i can embrace boredom at the moment for the next few months, must be constantly busy, and if i find myself not busy then i must fill my time with researching.
Afternoon light spilled in from a bank of windows as he described his routine. “A good day is one where I’ve overcome my procrastination, actually gotten out the door to shoot, weather cooperating.” He can get lost answering emails, surfing the Internet, grazing for new camera equipment. Pointing to the monitor at his desk, he leveled a modest bombshell with his tidy British accent.
he sounds like me, endless procrastinating, but he has found a way to be productive, be successful and get things done; i need to find a way that it works for me.
Given the 14 bodies of work Mr. Graham has produced over the last 30 years, his claims to distraction are more akin to Zen koans about diligence and rigor: “Sometimes I have to kill a couple of weeks doing other things, appearing to be very lazy while I’m actually finding my way through a problem.”
interesting what he says about distraction being a zen koan. i cofess i dont think i have heard the term koan before. so i had a quick google to understand the word. it seems a koan is a riddle that must be studied and thought about and the first answer that might spring to your head is just not it and completely misses the point, it must be thought about deeply for a long time without thinking of something else for the answer to be found.
i think this is interesting as i think he is saying that he is studying distraction, trying to search for and find the deeper meaning in it, and only by studying it for a long time can he understand, he cant just come to the answer in a first moment.
Mr. Graham had in mind what the French refer to as the “social fracture” while making “American Night,” on his first travels in America. The title alludes to the Truffaut film, “Day for Night,” a filmmaking term for creating nighttime scenes by underexposing footage shot in broad daylight.
he references this by overexposing his images, where the filmmaking technique was to undeerexpose to get a faux nighttime, he is making a faux washed out scene, it is almost completely devoid of detail to say they are all a whitewash, a blur, maybe they are of similarity to him, where he has a yearning for the houses that he does depict in colour.
Susan Kismaric, former senior curator of MoMa - The everyday moments he captured “are, after all, how we spend most of our time, mindlessly active or lost in thought — they provide what appears to be the undercurrent of our existence,” she said. “Paul’s work is innovative, inventive and freshly imagined, while rooted in photography’s magic, that is, its ability to transform the mundane into a picture with resonance.”
Maybe actually i need to embrace this times of procrastinating, but they always lead to further stress that i didnt accomplish something while i was procrastinating, i think the problem also for me is i havent found a way of capturing something procrastinatory and turn it into something creative.
“Why is everyone addicted to prepackaged spectacular moments, as if that’s all that’s worth photographing?” Mr. Graham said. “There is so much more to the flow of life all around us that isn’t revolving around perfect page-one moments.”
how can i make this work in a body of work?
Mr. Graham is alert to “someone sitting at the bus stop, or someone smoking a cigarette,” he said. “You know, some moment of quiet beauty that arrived into your life and was humbling, really.”
Call it that dumb, just-being-there quality or a second glimpse of the “it-ness” of those moments, perhaps a clarity of the kind evoked in the metaphors in imagist poetry: “So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens,” wrote William Carlos Williams. So much, indeed.
additional information http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/apr/11/paul-graham-interview-whitechapel-ohagan
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