Monday 13 March 2017

Pictures from Lancefield

Tried hard to find a way to post photographs while in Lancefield, like really really hard.  (I don't have the Blogger app on my phone.) Here's a great swathe of the pictures I took that I wanted to publish. 




I'm fully aware that nobody will be very interested in looking much at them, not even me really. Taking pictures like these is as easy as breathing. Consequently we are all awash in them. These are kind of crappy, certainly in comparison to the actual living scenes, and in even in comparison to phone camera photos taken by someone with a more purposeful approach to making a picture that actually conveys something. 


Why did I take them? Why did I want so much to put them here? 

(I wrote 'put' because I couldn't decide between 'share' or 'post' - words that close down the question of whether this blog is me talking to myself or whether I'm talking to other people, and I want to keep that open.) 

You need to keep in mind that when I ask questions like that, I know they are plonker questions, but I have whacked a great big orange inflatable pair of parentheses around that issue for the time being. Also, my curiosity about these things is real, but on the whole fairly mild. Not 'urgent', 'pressing' etc.


Perhaps also worth keeping in mind that today is Monday and my doctor is away doing god knows what god knows where with god knows whom. So the conversation with myself is no doubt getting a bit loaded. If I really was as smart as all that I would be making better use of this opportunity to commandeer my own analysis and really get some solid work done. On the trip home I suddenly thought, I should have used some of the time away from everything that has just ended to think quietly about what I really want. Oh shit, and oops. Too late for that now.


Ahem, as I was saying, about these ok but not that interesting pictures. Around about the time digital cameras got good memory capacity I had a bit of a revelation: I didn't actually need to take home all the amazing bizarro crap and tat I would see in op shops and garage sales, I could just photograph it and enjoy it that way. 



Working this out about taking pictures of things instead of physically acquiring them probably saved me from a life where all the rooms in the house are full and there is a two-foot gap at the top of each doorway where you sort of slide through from one roiling seething morass of hoarded things to the next. It's actually pretty bad in this house with the weird old crap as it is.

Photographing a place where you've been and you've felt something is a bit the same way. The photo is a standin for the practice of consumption of one sort of another. In Lancefield I felt what I am always feeling these days: 


when there's a bit of psychic space - a break from work, family, just dealing, whoosh!, in it floods, the yearning, yearning, yearning. Your basic, generic desire. Wanting something, I don't know what. Well, I sort of do, but I think the yearning is primal and the surface content to some extent is incidental. Which in itself is a little bit sad. There are lots of ways of describing this need, or urge or whatever it is. In one register, it's FOMO; in another really annoying register, which after all this time I still don't really want to accept as valid because it's so bloody dispiriting, it's the infant needing the breast. Whatever it's called, it hurts and it's real, and it is always waiting for a chance to get into me and be felt, felt, felt, felt, felt. 

That's what these pictures are of.


So, when you look at this sunset, or these gum leaves, if you have made it this far which I rather doubt, you may wish to view it as not just an innocuously pretty scene, perhaps you might also think about what was happening inside to person holding the phone. Or you may not. 


Entirely up to you. Enjoy your day. x

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