Parts for some hand-made books — pages, covers, and glue.
I create things I need to create. I guess in some sense I make things for somebody else, though not for some specific somebody else. For me, creating something and leaving it in the world completes the process. The dopamine rush comes from making and leaving, not from some affirmation or condemnation in the form of likes or dislikes, follows or unfollows, thumbs up or thumbs down.
Recently finished hand-made books, soon to be left somewhere.
I guess I would call this a type of a-social media.
In the bygone days of film photographers with the resources and energy to print their own photographs weren’t constrained by anything but the size of paper they could purchase and their ingenuity for rigging up a system to project light onto that paper. But for most people who took their film down to the local Fotomat — those goofy little drive-up kiosks in shopping center parking lots — to be developed and printed, a couple options reigned: 4×6, 5×7. You could order enlargements, but they tended to fall into one of a few common sizes. The vestiges of these formats linger in the aspect-ratio options found in most photo processing applications. Photographers today are no longer constrained by those aspect ratios, but instead can (and should) think of aspect ratio as part of composition, i.e., an artistic choice.
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I like the square format for some photos but not all (despite Instagram’s best efforts, I think the square format doesn’t work for most photographs). For me, graphic, simple images that have a prominent subject work best. Recently I took a few photos of some macarons and chocolates from the local French café, Delice et Chocolat.
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For these photos, I really liked how the square format worked well with the overall composition I had imagined. A rectangular format, e.g., 4×6, might have worked for the first image, but I think it is stronger as a square. The second image would have been a disaster in some rectangular aspect ratio.
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.