Wednesday 5 March 2014

12 layers of the past. Finding 'me' under there.

12 layers of the past. by James_at_Slack
12 layers of the past., a photo by James_at_Slack on Flickr.

This is the back wall of a box bed in an abandoned cottage called Allalogie. See this post for the story of my first visit there.  

I stood at this colourful view into the 'past' layers of wallpaper for a while. It was like peeling back the stories of the place - why would you put layer upon layer of wallpaper on the wall? what can it tell us about the people who lived here? who might have lived here? what would it have been like to live here?

Later, back home processing the image, I started daydreaming about being able to strip away layers of my own history to see the changes, to see the good choices, to see the not so good choices with the benefit of hindsight. What would the 'original wall' look like, stripped of all the coverings? Would it be the real me or is the real me the accumulation of all these changes, all these choices, all these shifts of direction?

Last Easter holidays I began reading Steve Simon's book The Passionate Photographer, determined to really 'do it', i.e. work through his tasks and exercises, as the book had been highly recommended to me. 

Well, did I not get stuck at Step One - finding your inspiration, finding your passion! 

A huge part of getting that right is knowing who you are and it seems each time I try to find 'me' it becomes a bit more elusive than I expected. Am I alone is this? Is it just me or is trying to know 'who you are' really quite difficult? 

Maybe I'm a bit more Anaglypta than Flock - repeated patterns?

5 comments:

Michael Jackson said...

Great post James. When you talk about finding yourself - and how it seems to get more elusive the harder you look - I found these steps helped with me -
1. Find a subject that nobody has explored deeply yet
2. Make sure that it is a subject that fills you with excitement
3. Stick with it and work with it and dedicate yourself to it and don't give up working on it - no matter what anyone else says
4. As you work on it your understanding of it will become unique
5. With that uniqueness you will have something to hang your identity on and you will start to see things that others have not.

Hope that this makes some kind of sense - this is basically how I found my work progressing at Poppit.

Mike

James Dyas Davidson said...

Thanks for the comment Mike. That's a great list and I know that your advice is coming from experience. You have done exactly that and we've all been impressed with your brilliant creative work, so it works!

It's number 1 on that list that's the difficult one though. Finding that interest is linked to who you are. I wonder if just getting out there and immersing in something - anything, will eventually help find what really interests someone?

Michael Jackson said...

James, from going through your work it looks like you are already past number 1??? It looks like you have already found a subject that fascinates you?

Catherine said...

I love your picture and writing James. I've been in that cottage at Allalogie while on a walk with some friends and had very similar thoughts (although you express them more eloquently than I could).

James Dyas Davidson said...

Mike - yes, up to a point. I started exploring abandoned places as part of my interest in local history. I took photographs of them and people liked them. When I did some image research on some abandoned places, I was amazed to find that urban and rural exploration was such a popular thing!

I clearly need to work on steps 4 and 5 now Mike.

Side note: the more I get into the history of these abandoned places, the more I just want to find out more about where the people went and what they did. The photography is wondering where do they come in?

Catherine, thanks for those kind words.