Blog About Photography

Last night I had some­thing of a pro­found real­iza­tion antic­i­pat­ing the first day of my final semes­ter in col­lege: I love being here. I have always been in a mas­sive hurry to get on to more adult stages of life, espe­cially in high school which is a period that didn’t pro­duce a lot of happy mem­o­ries. With that in mind, I have tried to appre­ci­ate the expe­ri­ence of being in col­lege, bask in the the age-​​appropriateness of it. Even so, I have, for the past cou­ple of years, have been strug­gling with what seemed to be a kind of pro­tracted detain­ment in an envi­ron­ment exhausted of its resources ush­ered in by a bout of depres­sion at the end of sopho­more year from which it has taken a lot of time and hard work for me to bounce back.

Since about April, the goal of switch­ing gears from Gov­ern­ment to Fine Art and some time in grad school has pro­vided me with ener­giz­ing focus and a much-​​needed infu­sion of dis­ci­pline. Last night I was scan­ning neg­a­tives from break, another pos­i­tive rein­force­ment of focus and dis­ci­pline, and I real­ized, rather quickly and star­tlingly, that approach­ing school this way makes it pretty fun. It has taken me this long to fig­ure out my direc­tion and find my rhythm, and now it’s time to leave? I’m going to miss all these educa­tive con­flicts; bat­tling to keep reg­u­lar hours and eat con­sis­tently and at nor­mal times, grap­pling with absurd ideas for ridicu­lous papers, mus­ter­ing all my intel­lec­tual capac­ity to meet some pro­fes­sors astro­nom­i­cal stan­dards — but with absolutely no stakes.

I am an expert at cre­at­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for myself; I am equally adept at squan­der­ing them. I wish that I had found all of this ear­lier to have this expe­ri­ence for a longer period of time when I think of all the things I could have learned last year but didn’t. I wish I had worked harder sooner and maybe even had gone to NYU when I had the oppor­tu­nity. These aren’t regrets per se, just sort of acknowl­edg­ments of what I now know that I am really capa­ble of.

In response to a cer­tain British nov­el­ists sug­ges­tion that, for me, Yale or Colum­bia, or some such place, would serve as a short­cut into the gallery sys­tem — it would be fan­tas­tic if they were, but that’s not what this next step is imme­di­ately about. I have been oper­at­ing below capac­ity for so long and now that I’m finally able to push myself and reap the ben­e­fits, stop­ping before I’m really done soak­ing it all in seems like the worst pos­si­ble thing I could do for myself. It is remark­able that the British nov­el­ist in ques­tion found her way to my hum­ble blog, so I would like to thank her for doing so and trig­ger­ing this eval­u­a­tion of my intentions.

Fuck­ing a. Now I’m going to get some­thing to eat in the din­ning hall before going to do other col­legey things. Cause in a few more months, it’s all going to be over.

Over the week­end, I applied to MFA pro­grams at Yale, Colum­bia, RISD and the Inter­na­tional Cen­ter of Pho­tog­ra­phy. It took about 36 hours of work cost $325 in appli­ca­tion fees and print­ing costs. The Par­sons appli­ca­tion is due by Feb 1, and I’m almost done with it.

So, I’ve applied. We’ll see what hap­pens. But I did it, which should indi­cate how seri­ous I am about it. Those of you who know me, which is, I assume, every­one who reads this, know that I don’t every do any­thing I don’t really want to do, even when I am oblig­ated to do it. So. I’m pretty fuck­ing seri­ous about grad school is my point.

I’ll tell you who’s awe­some: Kata­rina Jerinic, who helped me with my essays, pick­ing port­fo­lio images and spent who knows how many hours on the phone with me hash­ing all this shit out. May God rain bless­ing down upon her.

And I hope I get in somewhere.

I got back to DC last night with almost 50 pages of new neg­a­tives. Unfor­tu­nately, almost every­thing I shot with my Has­sel­blad was ruined by a light leak I didn’t know about… but there are still a cou­ple usable expo­sures per roll. I have a ton of 35mm stuff, some of which is pretty good. I’ll be putting it all up on flickr, and repost­ing some stuff here that is illus­tra­tive of the direc­tion I hope to be mov­ing in. Like this:

More to come on this topic.