intimate/personal space #1 ~ messy intimacy
Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 03:28PM 
Bed #1 • click to embiggenA few days ago I was visually attracted to my bed. There was something about the disorder that made me think of quite a number of things - comfort, warmth, intimacy, rest, rejuvenation, just to name a few of the sensations that suggested themselves to me by way of the rumpled bed. I can't say that all of those feelings / sensations were apparent to me at the time but they are now, now that I have pictured the scene and looked at the pictures.
Looking at the pictures and letting myself get sucked into the sensations caused me to think that a series might be possible - hence, intimate/personal spaces.
So, I started wandering around the house looking for the kind of spaces that seemed at first glance to arouse visual and intuitive experiences that were similar to the rumbled bed picture. I made a fair number of pictures and they all turned out to be total failures except for one. I'll present that one in tomorrow's entry.
What that second successful picture made clear to me was that I was confusing "messy" with "intimate". In the bed picture, the bed was messy and I realized that it was the "mess" that suggested a human presence which led to thoughts of intimacy and warmth - unlike my unsuccessful pictures of the total train-wreck mess in the teenage girl's room.
That mess seemed like it would be ripe for the picking but all it/I produced was pictures of a mess. There was no intimacy, no warmth, no comfort, no nothing like any of that. It was just a mess. One could certainly assume human activity of some kind was associated with the mess but that was not the kind of human presence I am after.
In any event, one of the prime motivators driving this series is the desire to get a lttle more person oriented, a little more intimate and little less distant with my subject than I have been with most of my previous stuff (with which I will continue).
FYI - I see this as a series of diptychs.
Reader Comments (2)
One Man's mess, may be Another Teen's dream. Is the intimacy in the heart of the holder?
gravitas is often gravitationally attracted to his bed...