january 1-3, 2012

i decided to document my photographs in a more permanent place. i take more pictures than i write, and images seem to provoke more detailed memories....
i take photos every day. lots of photos. often they are of mundane things, because i enjoy mundane things. i enjoy the tweakage and surreality of mundane things caught in time.
enough frippery. talking about what you do and why you do it is insufferable and pretentious as fuck.
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1 january 2012. this is horribly aligned. i'm still trying to figure out the goddamn hipstamatic framing.

side story: years ago, i had an idea of doing a photo project about what people have in their refrigerators and cabinets. it would be a series of spontaneous, unprettied views of how people actually live, and everybody eats, so there'd be something in the images that we could all relate to. and it's interesting to see how labels change, and people's selections of condiments, if they have leftovers or earnestly leafy produce or piles of crap... alongside the photos would be brief synapses of the people who lived there- age, gender, race, profession, income. i thought it would be a sociological revelation, because i was about twenty at the time and thought everything i thought was fucking brilliant and novel. but i never did it, and other people since have produced very similar tomes, but much more attractively and skillfully. ah, youth.
it is that story that i always think of when i take pointless pictures like this.
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2 january 2012: fucking with filters.



3 january 2012: spectacular renton washington.

buildings like this were once new. somebody thought this squat, vile structure would be the absolute best thing to occupy this space. it probably supplanted something else that had been there for years. the asbestos ceiling was bright with promise, the industrial carpet unscathed. now it's vacant, forgotten, useless. fascinating.
i used to know someone who grew up in renton, forty years ago. one day we were driving down rainier. "i was born there" they told me, pointing to their right. "you were born in a parking lot?" i said stupidly. "no. that's where the hospital used to be." it's a mclendon's hardware now.
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thanks for reading. welcome to my new diary.