cranky hermits
The Monday/Thursday experiment finished about a month ago. I thought I would write about it then, but perhaps I needed some distance first. I hadn’t looked at the full slideshow until just this morning. I’m astonished at the deep emotions I attach to my images, which saw me in Minnesota, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa, Seattle, the beaches of Northern California, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, and Boston. I was dissertating and remodeling a house and dealing with death and love. Quite a few friends and loved ones appear in various ways: Compatriot G, Gina, Fresca, Mister Husband, my parents, my Sainted Dead Grandma, our cousin Kathy, my mother-in-law.
It was fun to have so many of you along for the ride, but for those who weren’t: the project was a collaborative experiment in photography and serendipity that Jenny and I undertook. One day in early 2008, she blogged about completing her Project 365 and looking for a new project. I said, “Hey, we should do something together,” and so we dreamed up Monday/Thursday. Over the course of a year, we shot 104 themes without discussing our individual compositions, posted them to a shared Flickr account, and diptyched the results. We’ve known each other online for years, but since we live about 1,400 miles apart, we didn’t meet face-to-face until this past January.
Jenny was a great person to undertake long-term, long-distance collaboration and negotiation with : similarly cranky, but patient and compassionate and creative and funny. I don’t presume to speak for her at all here, but I think it’s fair to say that shooting so consistently drove some artistic growth for both of us (although not increased technological expertise for me, since I focused on so many other things). Somewhere in the summer, our sensibilities and ethics began to diverge, which resulted in an interesting tension: her work began to embrace what I would call magical realism, enhanced by a lensbaby and PhotoShop work, while I began to skew more strictly documentarian. It’s been fascinating for me to watch her progression and I’d like to think that her recent solo diptychs, which I adore, (see here, here, and here) were the tiniest bit influenced by what we did — if for no other reason that doing diptychs twice a week does teach you to think about dual images.
As for me, I learned to shoot whether I felt like it or not, much the same way one writes regardless of mood. I learned to work toward constructions I had in my mind instead of just things I found. I learned to think about photographic space, and which images would work as part of a dual composition, which necessarily also means they need to work when viewed smaller. I learned more about when to back up and shoot wide rather than always defaulting to macro.
And I learned that it’s good to work creatively with someone else. I knew this about work-work, but entered into this partnership with some trepidation. As it turned out, it paid off it spades. I spent a weekend with Jenny and her wife Lisa in Boston in between a couple of campus visits, and they were exactly as I hoped. Jenny and I still talk frequently, even though there’s nothing going on now that means we have to. And I’m looking forward to us all living a bit closer to each other after Mister Husband and I move this summer. We were friends before we did this, which means I can’t claim it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but it does feel a bit that way.
