If you’ve spent time in my company you may have heard me say, blithely, once or twice, that I’m not into visual art. I have a very large bedroom with very bare grey walls (I’ve been threatening to paint these since I moved in, but it is a very big room) which, save for a nail for my keys and a bamboo dry-erase board, are entirely unadorned. It is true that I would not frame and hang a painting or a picture on my walls, and it’s also true that I’ve never bought a single print or book of photography, or spent much money on the cinema, or on museums. All of this may seem strange to many of you, as I suspect most of you have experienced me largely through my photographs, and I would have to agree with you; it is strange. But when I have said things blithely it is usually because my feelings about something are more complex than I’m willing to admit or ready to discuss.  I have been carrying a camera for about three years now, which is roughly as long as I’ve been playing guitar, and particularly in the last year I’ve spent a lot of time trying to appraise my relationship to those different mediums and the communities that surround them. In those three years I have found the practice of photography and the practice of music both to be incredibly fortifying, educational, and elating, but I came to them for very different reasons. I began taking pictures because I found myself, one day, with a borrowed camera in my hand, unable to let it go simply because it allowed me to recontextualize and more vividly remember my own experiences, and because it came to motivate me to seek out more beautiful experiences, especially once I realized I could use it as a means of communication and not just a means, so to speak, of storage. I had no previous inclination; it was an accident. I had very little technical or historical understanding of the medium and its culture beyond what I think one must pick up through a lifetime of automatic exposure to journalism, advertising, and books distractedly perused from their seats on so many coffee tables. I had no desire for it, as an art. It was not something I consumed or loved deliberately. I began playing guitar, finally, after years wasted on insecurity and doubt, because I loved music, and could not bear any longer not to make myself a part of it. I do not remember myself before I had begun to sing - I was too small. Until my late teens, I do not think I managed for more than a handful of nights to fall asleep to silence, and on the street I tried always to recall without aid the rise and fall of a melody, and in the car the games were all ways humming games. And even when I fell asleep to silence more often it was only because I’d started sleeping with people less willing than myself to be sung to sleep. I came to photography because taking pictures was (and remains) a useful tool in an ongoing recovery. I came to music because it was always there, because I have consumed it and been consumed by it, and, if I am honest, because it is the one thing I love more than myself or anything outside myself. And I have always felt, somehow, a little uncomfortable, a little bit unjust, a little dishonest about my work, as a result. For a long time I was always asking myself: Can you responsibly create in a medium if you don’t love it for its own sake, if you do not teach yourself its history, if you do not, after all this time, know the names of its gods? Do you disrespect yourself by working in a medium you respect only very conditionally? if your creation/product is in a certain medium, should you feel obliged to consume/purchase works within that medium, and if so, why? Is the obligation to consume an obligation to your peers, your supporters, your medium, or to yourself, and your understanding of your practice/product? If you’d like to tell me what you think, please do. I am very curious to know whether any of you who create are absorbed by the same or similar questions, and, if so, what conclusions you’ve drawn. I still ask myself, often.  That is not to say that I work entirely in a vacuum, or that I never enjoy looking at a photograph. Every day I look at photographs from young people, most of whom seem to work generally outside the gallery circuit and for their own pleasure. I view these exclusively on the internet, and I am predictable: I like photographs that make me want to go specific places, or do specific things. I like the photographs of Anna Shelton because I know I have honored and will continue to honor the impulse to explore those places she and others like her have photographed. For a small time one could find online images captured across the US in the 1970s by a woman named Sharon Tingley. The flickr account her daughter kept for her has since been emptied, and while a few of her photos remain in dusty parts of the blogosphere, I have not found my favourite: close up, in red flannel, the head and shoulders of a young man laughing, the girl’s jean-clad ass slung over to the left. I think they must have been in the woods. I loved that picture, and many of Tingley’s pictures, because they were a reminder to live well. They told me to get off my ass and get happy, instead, somewhere beautiful filled with beautiful people. And if I ever have room on my very bare grey walls for a photograph, I know that I will have to hunt her down.  I value these photographs because they inspire me to live a life worth photographing, but I don’t revisit them. I would not return to them as I do to records I loved at 9 or 15, as i’ll someday revisit the records I love now. Which brings me to this: What interests me about the above flyer and its corresponding event (and you thought it was only tangentially relevant!) is that I actually want to go see the show. I have never felt the least bit inclined to visit a gallery for an exhibition of photographs. Here there is another context in which the medium is made valuable to me; I have a deep appreciation for the work of John Vanderslice, NoisePop, and Bay Area local music. Peter Ellenby has been NoisePop’s official photographer for the last 18 years, and as I understand it the exhibit will feature pictures of Vanderslice from the last 15 of those. I want to see 15 years of someone like Vanderslice, whose all-analog studio Tiny Telephone is probably the one place I’d like to drop a good chunk of change, and whose albums I love and respect tremendously because they are both intelligent and affecting. I want to know: how does an artist like Vanderslice create themselves? And, essentially, Can I get me some of that? But I am also very interested to see what happens to Ellenby over those 15 years. What changes come to his camera? What, if anything, does he notice and focus upon as time passes? Does his lens love people more or less the longer he knows them? My question is, really: What happens to you when you work in one medium for the sake of another? Partly because I feel this: if I am to take pictures, I think I ought really to start to value my work not just because the practice feeds me but also because I believe the product is worthy. I make the vast majority of my income as a photographer, and some good portion of that is doing work I don’t love. But I have saved up in a my chest a tiny dustball of hope, which hasn’t yet succumbed to the ills of the current economic climate and popular notions of the arts as being necessarily impractical. The dustball has a big label on it that says: Here is where you can find sustenance, both emotional and professional, in a thing in which you have real belief. I have always been self-involved, selfish, even when I have also been lovely, but I do hope, in the end, that whatever work I do will feed the one thing I have always known to be bigger than myself.  So In 15 years, if I am not either some John Vanderslice or some Peter Ellenby - I mean, if I have not spent my time making music or using whatever other skills I have to make sure good music reaches people, then I won’t have done what I set out to do, and you should all tell me I really fucked it up, big time.

If you’ve spent time in my company you may have heard me say, blithely, once or twice, that I’m not into visual art. I have a very large bedroom with very bare grey walls (I’ve been threatening to paint these since I moved in, but it is a very big room) which, save for a nail for my keys and a bamboo dry-erase board, are entirely unadorned. It is true that I would not frame and hang a painting or a picture on my walls, and it’s also true that I’ve never bought a single print or book of photography, or spent much money on the cinema, or on museums. All of this may seem strange to many of you, as I suspect most of you have experienced me largely through my photographs, and I would have to agree with you; it is strange. But when I have said things blithely it is usually because my feelings about something are more complex than I’m willing to admit or ready to discuss. 

I have been carrying a camera for about three years now, which is roughly as long as I’ve been playing guitar, and particularly in the last year I’ve spent a lot of time trying to appraise my relationship to those different mediums and the communities that surround them. In those three years I have found the practice of photography and the practice of music both to be incredibly fortifying, educational, and elating, but I came to them for very different reasons. I began taking pictures because I found myself, one day, with a borrowed camera in my hand, unable to let it go simply because it allowed me to recontextualize and more vividly remember my own experiences, and because it came to motivate me to seek out more beautiful experiences, especially once I realized I could use it as a means of communication and not just a means, so to speak, of storage. I had no previous inclination; it was an accident. I had very little technical or historical understanding of the medium and its culture beyond what I think one must pick up through a lifetime of automatic exposure to journalism, advertising, and books distractedly perused from their seats on so many coffee tables. I had no desire for it, as an art. It was not something I consumed or loved deliberately.

I began playing guitar, finally, after years wasted on insecurity and doubt, because I loved music, and could not bear any longer not to make myself a part of it. I do not remember myself before I had begun to sing - I was too small. Until my late teens, I do not think I managed for more than a handful of nights to fall asleep to silence, and on the street I tried always to recall without aid the rise and fall of a melody, and in the car the games were all ways humming games. And even when I fell asleep to silence more often it was only because I’d started sleeping with people less willing than myself to be sung to sleep.

I came to photography because taking pictures was (and remains) a useful tool in an ongoing recovery. I came to music because it was always there, because I have consumed it and been consumed by it, and, if I am honest, because it is the one thing I love more than myself or anything outside myself. And I have always felt, somehow, a little uncomfortable, a little bit unjust, a little dishonest about my work, as a result.

For a long time I was always asking myself:

  • Can you responsibly create in a medium if you don’t love it for its own sake, if you do not teach yourself its history, if you do not, after all this time, know the names of its gods?
  • Do you disrespect yourself by working in a medium you respect only very conditionally?
  • if your creation/product is in a certain medium, should you feel obliged to consume/purchase works within that medium, and if so, why? Is the obligation to consume an obligation to your peers, your supporters, your medium, or to yourself, and your understanding of your practice/product?

If you’d like to tell me what you think, please do. I am very curious to know whether any of you who create are absorbed by the same or similar questions, and, if so, what conclusions you’ve drawn. I still ask myself, often. 

That is not to say that I work entirely in a vacuum, or that I never enjoy looking at a photograph. Every day I look at photographs from young people, most of whom seem to work generally outside the gallery circuit and for their own pleasure. I view these exclusively on the internet, and I am predictable: I like photographs that make me want to go specific places, or do specific things. I like the photographs of Anna Shelton because I know I have honored and will continue to honor the impulse to explore those places she and others like her have photographed. For a small time one could find online images captured across the US in the 1970s by a woman named Sharon Tingley. The flickr account her daughter kept for her has since been emptied, and while a few of her photos remain in dusty parts of the blogosphere, I have not found my favourite: close up, in red flannel, the head and shoulders of a young man laughing, the girl’s jean-clad ass slung over to the left. I think they must have been in the woods. I loved that picture, and many of Tingley’s pictures, because they were a reminder to live well. They told me to get off my ass and get happy, instead, somewhere beautiful filled with beautiful people. And if I ever have room on my very bare grey walls for a photograph, I know that I will have to hunt her down. 

I value these photographs because they inspire me to live a life worth photographing, but I don’t revisit them. I would not return to them as I do to records I loved at 9 or 15, as i’ll someday revisit the records I love now.

Which brings me to this:

What interests me about the above flyer and its corresponding event (and you thought it was only tangentially relevant!) is that I actually want to go see the show. I have never felt the least bit inclined to visit a gallery for an exhibition of photographs. Here there is another context in which the medium is made valuable to me; I have a deep appreciation for the work of John Vanderslice, NoisePop, and Bay Area local music. Peter Ellenby has been NoisePop’s official photographer for the last 18 years, and as I understand it the exhibit will feature pictures of Vanderslice from the last 15 of those. I want to see 15 years of someone like Vanderslice, whose all-analog studio Tiny Telephone is probably the one place I’d like to drop a good chunk of change, and whose albums I love and respect tremendously because they are both intelligent and affecting. I want to know: how does an artist like Vanderslice create themselves? And, essentially, Can I get me some of that? But I am also very interested to see what happens to Ellenby over those 15 years. What changes come to his camera? What, if anything, does he notice and focus upon as time passes? Does his lens love people more or less the longer he knows them?

My question is, really: What happens to you when you work in one medium for the sake of another?

Partly because I feel this: if I am to take pictures, I think I ought really to start to value my work not just because the practice feeds me but also because I believe the product is worthy. I make the vast majority of my income as a photographer, and some good portion of that is doing work I don’t love. But I have saved up in a my chest a tiny dustball of hope, which hasn’t yet succumbed to the ills of the current economic climate and popular notions of the arts as being necessarily impractical. The dustball has a big label on it that says: Here is where you can find sustenance, both emotional and professional, in a thing in which you have real belief. I have always been self-involved, selfish, even when I have also been lovely, but I do hope, in the end, that whatever work I do will feed the one thing I have always known to be bigger than myself. 

So In 15 years, if I am not either some John Vanderslice or some Peter Ellenby - I mean, if I have not spent my time making music or using whatever other skills I have to make sure good music reaches people, then I won’t have done what I set out to do, and you should all tell me I really fucked it up, big time.

(Source: johnvanderslice)

Notes

  1. thatsarahbeth reblogged this from johnvanderslice and added:
    HOLY FUCK I MUST ATTEND THIS!!!
  2. brotherdreambrother reblogged this from johnvanderslice
  3. pforu reblogged this from johnvanderslice and added:
    If you’ve spent time in my company you may have heard me say, blithely, once or twice, that I’m not into visual art. I...
  4. learnandlivetotell reblogged this from johnvanderslice
  5. johnvanderslice posted this