I’ve been teaching homeschoolers ages 5-18 drawings, painting and photography on Tuesdays. Last week, I taught the photo classes how to use a long piece of white paper as an infinity wall to take seamless pictures of objects. We lit them with some drawings lamps I have from home depot. Check out how funny these body parts I got from the dollar store are - it was so much fun to watch the kids use them to take photos.
I’ve been spending too much time looking at William Eggleston. First “art” photographer I was ever really introduced to, sitting at my desk at NPR looking at his picture of dolls on top of the hood of a car. I checked out a book last week of his 5x7 portraits done using a flash inside of a TGI Fridays during the 70’s. Pretty great stuff.
That Alec Soth and I were best friends, or at least in some sort of mentoring program where he would maybe take me along to things with him and show me how to make my website just like his. Warning: Currently I’m failing at making a website and that link in fact just takes you to this very tumblr.
That I could resist complaining via the internet about things that are happening in my classes and also complaining out loud, like in real life. Sorry to my friends who I’m driving nuts.
That I could pick up enough teaching/subbing jobs so that I could afford both my iPhone bill (why on earth did I get an iPhone even though I really only use it to play solitaire) AND a ymca monthly membership because I am 80% positive that sometime in the near future I will have gone from slightly soft to completely out of shape.
And finally, that anybody who sees this could follow my awesome new blog Jackson Strange where you can see the ridiculous awesomeness that is living in a small town in Michigan called Jackson, the birthplace of the Republican Party.
my favorite…scan I guess? since it isn’t really one picture? from the mamiya camera i borrowed last semester.
As I watched the last few pages of my notebook dwindle down this week, I felt an odd sort of melancholy - both that this sketchbook, which has turned out this past school year to become my planner, journal, scribble-taker and even a sort of confidant, is all used up, but also that I have become this attached to an inanimate object. This was the passage I had written in the inside back cover; it’s from the book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Truth is, I find myself missing a lot of things. My friends spread across the country and state, my dad, my old Trek bike that some punk ass stole when I lived in D.C. I think that’s why I loved this passage so much and wrote it in what really is the most valuable real estate my sketchbook offered.
So, here’s to all the people I miss - I hope that one day, this can happen to us.
