The Irony of Being Physically Stuck Allowing the Mind to Unstick

The last three weeks have been a vacation away from my paying job, although the first two held quite a bit of laborious work packing up things for relatives and driving down to L.A. and back after the packing of the trailer. This last week I've been stuck at home due to the vast fields of snow and ice around me that prevented me from driving around or making it to work.

While I was in L.A., I was able to take time out to go see the exhibit of Vanity Fair portraits at LACMA. There were quite a variety of portraits and subjects on display, and a mix of photos I had seen before and ones I had not. The net result was to stir the imagination up a bit.

While being stuck here, I've gone through various stages of shortening the stack of unread books, watching movies, browsing the net, looking through the collections of photos I've gathered over the years, both ones I've taken myself and ones that I have seen on the web, and finally simple bored pacing around my prison, contemplating the walls of both it and life.

It's quite amazing what can come out of the recesses of the mind when one gets bored enough and the tangled cobwebs of ordinary concerns fade into the darkness. While thinking through a lot of things, I actually had an idea penetrate the wall of creativity block that has been frustrating me for quite a while now.

When contemplating a larger project such as a novel or a collection of photos, it helps to have a core idea to work around. That bit has been what has been missing and making me feel very constrained in these areas of writing and photography that I love. I had been expecting such inspiration to fly out in terms of a story, but I surprised myself by coming up with something else.

I finally came up with a pair of related and interacting themes that have been interesting to me for a while photographically, both in my own photos and others, although I had not put them together previously. What I'm aiming to do is put together a set of photos exploring those interactions and juxtapositions.

As an added bonus, I'll have to come out of my shell a bit and get others involved, because many of the photos I have in my head will require people to be in them and pose, as well as plenty of setup. Some of the images in the set may end up being spur of the moment shots, since I'm normally looking out for such things anyway, but it has become obvious that I want to move past that and make more complicated images.

To get the print quality I want I'll need to get a better camera system, not as nice as I'd like probably, but better than what I have now is a definite must. It will take some time to think through what I want to include and do the prep work for it anyway. I'm aiming for a gallery or a coffee book sort of thing, although in a sense it does not matter. This is for me.