Blog About Photography

© Greg Wasserstrom

Shortly after mov­ing to New York, I came to the real­iza­tion that I know a lot less about what I’m doing than I thought. I have, for essen­tially four years been try­ing to fig­ure out how to express, in pic­tures, a par­tic­u­lar view of Amer­ica. And I don’t mean the kind of “view” you get from a road­trip across the South­west or a trek though small South­ern towns or maybe some val­ley in Yel­low­stone some­where. By “a par­tic­u­lar view of Amer­ica,” I mean my view, Amer­ica lit­er­ally as I see it, right now, from where I’m stand­ing, at this very moment. I didn’t real­ize that’s what I’ve been try­ing to do until fairly recently. I ini­ti­tally viewed pho­tog­ra­phy as a way to break away from the pol­i­tics that I’ve been immersed and fixed by since essen­tially the time I devel­oped the abil­ity to think my own thoughts. As it turns out, there’s really no doing that. If I’m going to make inter­est­ing work it needs to be about some­thing I can speak on with some author­ity. The snag here though is that even though I offer up wat I view as essen­tially same com­men­tary at least 10 times every day in words, and that those words have even attained a cer­tain mar­ket value, I haven’t yet been suc­cess­ful in doing this cohe­sively in pic­tures. It devolved to the point where I was basi­cally just post­ing things to the inter­net, and now even that has slowed to a trickle. So it’s time to start fresh and approach this thing in a whole new way. I’s so quiet over here because I’m try­ing to fig­ure out just what that’s going to be all about.

Posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 10:44 am