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Haven't been around the interwebs very much lately. Life has been oscillating between terribly exciting and terribly terrible for the last few months. Attempting to remain sane, attempting to make art, attempting to tread water. My apologies if I have seemed distracted (or even absent).
I had an opportunity to shoot my friend Brooke the other day. While I no longer consider myself a photographer, I will still gladly pull out the camera gear to shoot photos for a friend, especially one who is willing to collaborate and bring some of their own energy to the table. Here is some of what we came up with:
   
More on my portfolio site here: http://larryholdaway.com/photography/brooke-chains/
The shoot started out rather silly and campy, but as we neared the end, and we had already covered all of the shots she needed, we started to riff on the use of the chains (which I had brought along purely as an after-thought). Out of that, something dark and uncomfortable evolved, a meditation on the horrible depths that love/obsession can drag one into.
The photos we intended to shoot turned out fine, and worked great for the client, but as I was editing, I kept coming back to these images instead. There is an uneasy undercurrent in my work lately, but not something I can really define or articulate. The words that spring to mind make no sense: heavy, wet, cold, rotted. When I think on it for too long, I get the sense that I can smell old, drying blood, that it is mid-day, but cold and dark, with a near freezing mist drifting from slate skies, seeping through my skin, making my bones ache. The trees are bare, the earth is dead, hope is lost.
This is why I try not to sit idle with my thoughts for too long.
That sensation, that impression, that (dare I say?) hallucination, nagged at me as I worked through these photos. The same feeling crept over me while I was working on this self portrait last month: "threadbare" (warning, NOT SAFE FOR WORK (or for hetero-males if Noah is to be believed)). In retrospect, the feeling has been with me in everything I've worked on for the last three months.
Hmm, I think I'll leave it there for now. I didn't intend to dig into this when I first started writing the entry.
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| - Lars |
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