day 1 of restarting the desert project: gathered all my TIFF and PSD files, got lightroom catalog set up on a portable SSD, imported everything
day 2: culled 500-something photos down to 150. further culling will be necessary.
context: i have been working on this as A Project since 2016 and never finished it. an iteration of it was my BFA project at SFAI, presented at an installation with hundreds of prints arranged on a desk for people to look through. i've restarted it several times. initially it was to accompany a post-apocalyptic science fiction narrative, with the intent that it accompany typewritten pages as a book, but i've changed a lot since then. if the final project will have a narrative, i want it to come from who i am now.
i will be bringing my printer back into service if it hasn't clogged irreparably from disuse. the editioned prints will not be the final product, but they will be beautiful and stunning and evocative. some of these images are ethereal desert landscapes, flowing hills shrouded in billowing clouds; others stark impositions of human industry on an environment that simultaneously preserves and erodes. some of my 2018 scans are defective and i may have to hunt down the negatives. i may have to go retrieve the big cintiq from storage. i have a lot of dust spotting to do.
they will be printed on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 gsm, or maybe 500. (I haven't tried 500 yet; might not be worth the extra weight if they're harder to mount.)
the ideal is: i sell enough of these to blow a huge hole in my debt, so i can live easier, and others can finally enjoy my work in a tangible fashion. i do not know if that is achievable. but i will try
e-waste recycling isn't supposed to be my main thing. I am a photographer. I have professional training sufficient to operate a digital print shop or analog darkroom by myself if necessary. I spent evenings and nights and sometimes mornings in the darkroom Ansel Adams built, developing film and learning what worked. even years before I went to school for this, i was learning to self-crit with a group of (now extraordinarily skilled) landscape photographers who bootstrapped ourselves out of Something Awful's photo forum and into galleries.
I have let this languish too long. Doing actual work again feels like I am dredging up deep-seated knowledge, things dormant in my soul and brain, waiting all this time to come alive. I need to stop putting the camera down.
i may have to go back to the desert
