I went to Coney Island once this summer and wasn’t really into it. I prefer Venice Beach which is equally as cheesy but the surrounding neighborhood is kind of interesting to get lost in for an afternoon. And really, that light and the Pacific as the sun goes down just can’t be beat.
We’re using Viewbook to build the website for strange.rs, so I’ve started using it for my personal website as well. I think it’s one of the better slideshow applications I’ve seen or used. I have sort of a love hate relationship with flash based slideshows but I think Viewbook is pretty slick.
This is a new edit of ‘The Electric Sunshine Velocity Trip’ series. You can read the statement here.
Editing is a maddening process. I’m currently stuck in a quagmire with my ‘ESVT’ edit. I’m missing something. Spontaneity? Jazz? The flow? To alleviate the tension I’ve decided to riff on the photographs I’m looking at right now. Not all of them work or will make the edit, but a blog seems to be the perfect place to play with editing. Photography’s relationship with the web seems uncomfortable at best. It’s the wild wild west and we’re living through it, this is the time to experiment.
©Bryan Formhals
I have a problem that perhaps many other photographers may also have. Even though I’ve edited and reviewed my archive time and time again, I keep going back looking for new insights. When I left for New York I was deep in the middle of editing my ESVT project and thought that I was close to finishing it. After all, there would be no more new photographs to add, and I’d set my mind on a general structure for the work. But then I left for New York and was displaced from my files for three months.
By that time I was well into shooting my new project ‘Drift.’ Wandering around the city photographing gave me plenty of time to reflect on the ideas I had for the ESVT edit. There were photographs I could remember, and many, many others that I had escaped my memory. I found myself sculpted the work from a philosophical point of view without actually looking at the photographs. What I could remember would stay. I started to sculpt the project in my mind, sensing a shorter, tighter edit. I would sketch words and phrases in my mind, packaging them together in the conceptual framework of the project. I was moving forward by virtue of detaching myself from the images.
Of course, much of this sentiment may have to do with the blah feeling I have toward a few photographs I was confident would be in the edit. It seems no matter what we want to think, the number of photographs that actually pass the test of time will continue to decrease as you age. This is a primary motivation for finishing a project. My feeling is if I can put finish this project to my satisfaction I’ll start to view it as a single piece and think less about the individual photographs contained within. ‘The end is important in all things.’
