Contrived

"A year ago..."

Contrived... Deliberately created rather than arising naturally or spontaneously. Created or arranged in a way that seems artificial and unrealistic.

A year ago today I photographed an image. It was my intention to share that with you today. It was an image of hope and love, of fear and joy. This is not that image. It was just too painful for me to work on that image, and so it remains undone in my to-do folder.

This image was not pre-inspired, nor was it what I set out to create. It was contrived as an after the fact technical challenge of failures and borrowed bits. The concept I originally set out to create just did not seem to come together. As I rarely create on location these days (you can read more about why on my blog), I kept returning to this folder searching for something that kept speaking to me. So much of life is just a contrived series of failures and borrowed bits...

Another failure... These images were all created a few months ago while I was on a road trip. Part of this road trip included a two nights stay in the town where I spent part of my childhood and rented an Airbnb owned by an old school friend. Over the two days I created a number of images while staying there - some worked and some were failures. This little image was somewhere in between of what worked and what failed. Created at the end of the day in the last trails of light while I was taking a few images of the house (after creating my image "Eleven"). It is not an image I would include in my portfolio, but it was just something I wanted to share here regardless.

It struck me while putting this blog post together, that the poses in these two images (neither of which was pre-planned) were very similar. Clearly something was on my subconscious and needed to be said...