"Something is Wrong"
Since this little project is at heart an attempt at a form of critical reflection - I thought this week it would be appropriate to turn that gaze around and lay it upon my own doings.
This wasn't the first zine I ever made, but it was my first photo-zine, and consists of 15 black and white photos I took during the first year I was trying to really seriously take pictures and was hyper-stoked on shooting film. The subject matter follows three veins: photographs from shows at Cold Spring Hollow, snowy wintry scenes I took while working at the dining hall and the museums at Amherst College, and shots from a few field trips across New England.
My friend Sloan was the one who turned me on to how easy it is to develop your own film at home. I was instantly hooked on the experience of pouring your chemistry out of your developing tank and holding up the strip of sopping wet negatives to the light to peek at the tiny silver images. I thought every frame I shot and developed was a masterpiece, in spite of all my errors and mistakes (like err… using dish soap in lieu of photo flo), and that amateur sense of wonder shows. Any photo from this period that could be called compositionally “good” is by mere accident, my scans exhibit scratches and debris not as a way to call attention to the materiality of analog photography but because I didn’t know how to minimize it and was hanging my film to dry in a palace of dust. I didn’t understand how scanning worked really, and figured I should always scan at the maximum resolution possible – sitting for thirty minutes at the media lab in between shifts at the dining hall and the museum waiting for the Epson flatbed to spit out one single 3gb .tiff file.
Sergej Vutuc’s zines (covered prev. ! ) were a huge influence on this product. I don’t remember how I discovered them, but his work inspired in me a real obsession with that kind of aesthetic – messy, anarchic, a nightmare landscape of blurred visages and nowhere places. My mind was in a soup of similar artists like Sigmar Polke, Miroslav Tichy, Emi Anrakuji, Antony Cairns, and Daido Moriyama and I wanted to make work like theirs but lacked any of the technical or artistic foundation. So I blush a little looking back at this skinny little zine to see that interest at play in these throw-away shots, and to think that I demanded $5 from anyone for it (and even made a sequel!) I definitely thought I was cooking with the final image in the sequence of tire tracks in the snow leading off into the pitch black night, I actually WAS cooking with the title text, which I made by printing out the cover, scratching it into the paper, then scanning it back in. I don’t know why I thought I needed to cover the staples in medical tape.
Whatever meaning this volume holds is so specific that I really do wonder if anyone else has a copy saved under their bed or in a closet somewhere. What stranger who traded me their noise tape for this could know about the smoking pit at the AC dining hall, the now long demolished Cranston nunnery, the snowed in noise show for Peter J Woods attended only by brave souls with 4 wheel drive cars. It makes me nostalgic for a very blurry time in my life. Suffocating under gray New England skies, living my life on Instagram posts and library photobooks during the night shift at the museum, bearing witness to raucous nights in our haunted manor, totally high on the feeling of the mirror slap from my cameras shutter button and the urge to create.
Read! here -> https://www.are.na/block/44933372
