Shooting

I was shooting tonight and had one of those moments where I realized a body of work was lying right in front of me. So I went along with shooting this idea throughout the neighborhood with my Hasselblad and bracket flash. I was wide open with the flash. If a gunshot were portrayed as light this flash would be the appropriate intensity. I was walking around the dark, calm neighborhood making sure to avoid stepping on the dry fall leaves that crackle louder than you expect. I felt like the sniper Susan Sontag speaks about. My Winchester had been replaced. I have never shot photographs from this approach. My work is about relationships and intimacy. This work was the antithesis of that.

I was photographing in the street and my flash startled two men out of their house to see what the ruckus was about. I turned around and calmly walked away as if I knew nothing about it. I felt like a sniper, a soldier, evading the area. My "mission" was successful.

The weird thing? My flash makes me dream of Diane Arbus and the only thing running through my head after I walked away from those men was this quote by the one and only:

"I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do - that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse."

-Diane Arbus