impressionistic cameraphone stories

When I’m out walking or skating in the urban landscape, I find my wandering attention being drawn to striking or amusing visual details. Lately, I’ve been capturing some of these little moments with my cameraphone. Taken individually, the images may be mildly interesting but not “picture-worthy”; that is, I wouldn’t think of them as particularly good or important or aesthetically pleasing. Collectively and in sufficient quantity, they become a montage that tells a story about the place, the time, and the way that I experienced it. These collections are definitely impressionistic, highly subjective, hardly a complete record of places or events. But they speak to me quite clearly, bringing me back to thoughts and feelings and experiences that I had at the time.

I started making these for skatelog, and there are a few different examples from the same physical territory in and around Stanford. Here the timeframe was typically an hour.

We were in Maui for a week recently. These started to look a bit more like vacation pictures, I think. But I also had my “real” camera and used it for the “real” photos. Sometimes I took pictures of the same thing with both cameras, conscious that I would use them in different ways.

Last week I walked around Porto Alegre, Brazil one morning.

This week I was in Bristol, UK for several days. The trail led from San Francisco to Heathrow, through Windsor, and then into Bristol proper.

Hmm, now I remember doing something like this more than 20 years ago, tripping through the crazily twisted streets of Boston and San Francisco, capturing moments that seemed appealingly, unnaturally funny. I’ll have to try to find some of those old trips and scan them up.

Posted by Gene at March 28, 2004 10:32 PM | TrackBack