Dead January

 

DEAD JANUARY

 


My photo set here is named Dead January, I’ve never liked January as it’s always been a really annoying time of being cold while all the snow melts and gets dirty, kind of highlighting the rotting of a lot of structures, it’s also spiritually the beginning of work for everybody and it’s when all of the worst movies of the year get dumped. So I took a couple of pictures that I felt capture that kind of death felt during the beginning months. I wanted to take pictures on an actual camera but didn’t figure out how to work it and had to use my phone unfortunately. I also didn't get to figure out photoshop in time so these are all unedited, so I guess that's a problem.  Though I guess that fit’s into the early month malaise of wanting to do something and it not really working out.


"There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago."
— J. Robert Oppenheimer


In terms of the amateur feel I felt myself struggling with this, I’ve taken a photography class and am familiar with things like the rule of thirds, every time I took a picture I found myself unintentionally applying these learned rules all over the place, so really my attempt at being amateur just wound up involving taking as many pictures as possible without thinking.  I wonder if someone else might accidentally do the same thing though even if they weren’t familiar with the terms, but implicitly understand what a stereotypical “good” photo would look like based on what they’ve seen with postcards and stuff.


“The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment.”

— Marshall McLuhan
 

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