1. Back to teaching this week
2. Remembering the difference between a bad day and a bad job
3. Planning for the future
4. Dodger perched on my lap
5. Spending time with kids this afternoon/ evening

In honor of the beginning of spring, and in observation of the fifth anniversary of the war, I humbly submit a piece I wrote three years ago about a different conflict in the middle east.

It’s not that there isn’t plenty to say about the war in Iraq. I am in complete support of our troops, I have friends who are in Iraq, who have returned from Iraq, and who are about to go to Iraq. These are people who I love dearly. I can love and support them, and their decision to join up, without supporting the government that got us into the conflict.

I am posting this article because it accurately reflects my feelings on conflict and war.

Another world is possible

It’s a new navigation tab!! It takes you to my brand spanking new photoblog, from which I am selling prints. They are a great deal! You should buy some art (made by me) for your home!

Why do we make art? Is it a choice? I was in a retreat at the beginning of college for writers, and I remember the professor saying that for a writer, there is no choice about it. You write, or you slowly lose your mind.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I express myself the way that I do. I used to be a writer. It was unequivocal. I wrote. But now, now I would like to write, but I don’t know what to write about. And every time I get an idea, the application of pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) seems to fall short. And perhaps because it used to come so easily, I never developed the discipline to make myself write through the hard parts.

When it comes to photography I have been trying very hard to understand what appeals to me about a shot before I actually hit the shutter. Perhaps it’s because so many of my pictures seem to have general appeal, but don’t feel like they mean anything. People like pictures of flowers, and they will often pay for prints, and hang them in their homes, but is that really the art that I want to make?

At the beginning of a two year art course in high school the teacher showed us the movie Basquiat, and made a particular point of the line at the start of the movie where Andy Warhol tells Basquiat (I think it was those two characters, it’s been about 12 years since I saw the flick) “The only thing that really matters is how much can you get for it…”

I love to document the unexpected in every day life, whether that is beauty or ugliness. I have learned to identify why I take each picture, but am I actually trying to accomplish anything by doing so? Is it necessary to have an overarching goal in order to create art? Would my images be somehow less genuine if I took them with an eye for whether they would sell? What if my overarching goal is that someday I want to be able to support myself from taking pictures, whether that is selling them as art, or as a photo-journalist, or as a portrait photographer?

What does it mean that I haven’t been able to write something I am really proud of since I left college? Am I now no longer a writer? Am I a writer and a photographer? Or does it not mean anything other than that I am lazy and unwilling to put in the work to create a piece of writing that I can be proud of?

I read about photographers who do so much work in the darkroom, or in photoshop. Am I less of a photographer because I try to take the picture that I want the first time around? My pictures look good, but is there something there that someone who knows more than I do would see and think “ah, well, this isn’t actually finished because she didn’t alter it in photoshop”. And why is it that I accept my initial efforts in photography but not in writing? If the story is represented visually rather than textually, does it somehow make it easier to understand on first glance?

This artist is having something of an existential crisis….

It’s been really hard to write recently, and take pictures. I don’t know what’s at the root of it, maybe just a waning moment of creativity in my life, or perhaps it’s the fact that I spend eight to ten hours a day wishing I was somewhere else. Whatever it is, it’s plunged me into a place of absorption. I am reading a lot, I am looking at a lot of other peoples work, and I am trying to reclaim the part of me that yearns to create.

It makes me nervous that this is happening now, as spring is usually a fairly creative and productive time for me.

Unbirthday Presents will be going out by the end of the week. Please make sure that I have your address by e mailing rachelariel[dot]brandt[at]gmail[dot]com