Perspective
A magazine emailed me and said do you want to have a little article on your studio? if so, send us some images & writing...
Uh, okay, I thought. The writing part will be easy - I could more or less copy & paste from my daily journal, where I try to keep a record of what I'm doing with clay & in the studio. But pictures? Images. That could be harder.
I'm actually a little ambivalent about pictures being taken in the studio. I'm not a giant fan of all the process shots you see on Instagram although, admittedly, I have posted an occasional one of my own. Like GoPro footage of people running rapids in kayaks, after a while shots of throwing pots all look the same.
But it's more than that that worried me I think. When you take a picture of the work you're doing you're giving it perspective - you're looking at it - you're separating yourself, saying I'm here and you're over there. That kind of self-awareness is exactly what I'm trying to escape, a lot of the time, when working in clay.
I want to be immersed - I want the work to come through me without my mind, my view, getting in the way.
On the other hand...it would be good to be in a magazine.
I called a friend. Do you think maybe sometime next week...in the mornings the light might be best...could you come by & take a few shots?
Sure. My friend arrived, and took off his shoes, and took a look at the camera I had. I don't know if you knew, he said, but I used to do some photography...
There's always an element, seeing an image of yourself, of the horror you feel when hearing your voice on a recording. But there's a bit of that anyway, just from unloading the kiln & encountering your own finished work - I made this. This is me - this is my own best effort. You have to get used to the feeling of exposure, on some level. My friend zoomed in for a lot of closeups - something I wouldn't have thought of. Actually, after a while, getting to work, I forgot he was there at all.
It's still a little weird to look at the pictures. The studio is an environment I don't want perspective on - I don't want to see it through someone else's lens - I don't really want to see it at all, I just want to inhabit it. It has taken a long time to develop this space, both the physical dimension and the psychological one, the creative discipline that goes along with it.
Nevertheless. I picked out the best images and uploaded them to Google Drive.
Now the easy part - the writing. They're gonna want me to keep it short, I thought, cleverly anticipating the editing process - I'm going to have to really pare it down, that's what they'll say, let's shorten this up. I wrote a few pages & sent them off in a PDF...
A few days later they got back to me. Looks okay, they said. The pictures are alright but the copy is a little short - do you have anything else you could say?