DARIN HAYTON

Tag: Local photography

  • I’m trying to entertain …

    I’m trying to entertain …

    For me, creativity fulfills its purpose when realized in the creation of something. I am not particularly bothered if nobody likes it (either in the traditional sense of like or in the social media sense of like). I don’t take pictures, make photographs, collect moments and scenes, or write words either hoping for approval or fearing disapproval. I create when I want to create something. It is an act of thinking, of reflecting, of musing, of imagining. I create for an audience of two, an audience both intimately familiar and entirely foreign. I create for my present and future selves. Each photograph, each paragraph a souvenir, a memento mori, a requiem.

    #210115

    I feel no compulsion to participate in an economy of likes and followers. Even a 1000 true fans is more than I need to be happy, to be a success. When I am ambitious, I think: “I’m not trying to entertain the world, I’m trying to entertain people with the same values and interests that I have.” But most days I’m happy only trying to entertain myself.

  • Winter Wind

    Winter Wind

    A cold wind whistled through the branches. The winter wind is different. Not simply frigid, though it is surely that, even the slightest breeze produces a haunting, lonely sound. I stand at the edge of a meadow listening to an arboreal death rattle, frozen branches creaking as dry air wheezes through a bronchial network of branches. The winter wind is bitter and unforgiving. But to confront that wind, to feel the biting cold on your exposed skin, to shiver as it steals inside your collar, is to experience life. The cold is a reminder that you are alive.

    #210106
  • Collecting Details

    Collecting Details

    Pause. Look around. Look closely. What have I not noticed every other time I’ve passed this spot. Whether mundane and dull or extraordinary and beautiful. Somewhere around me right now is a detail I’ve not seen before. Find it and add it to my “Museum of Overlooked Details.”

    #210106
  • Collecting Moments

    Collecting Moments

    On a typical weekday afternoon, a line of cars stretches down to the stoplight at the bottom, often twenty or so of them stopped on their trip home. On the other side, cars that have recently come through the intersection careen home. Crossing, even in the marked crosswalk, is a risk.

    #210102

    This afternoon, I enjoyed walking down the center of the street without a car in sight. It was a moment. My camera allows me to collect life’s moments, the quiet ones, the daily ones, that tend to escape notice. Life’s moments, whether mundane or profound, are worth collecting.