Retoning the new year; rethinking the last.
New year’s night, before:
and after:
I think better. I also think lesson: never leave your camera on Vivid while shooting JPEGs. Bitch of a time taming that saturation.
New topic: I went to the Sebastião Salgado show at AMoA [PDF link] yesterday. It’s very significant work that arguably has more resonance right now than ever before. Some photographs also had special meaning to me because of my recent trip to India — and not in the “Ooh, I was there!” sense, but rather in the “I need to strive for deeper understanding of the world in order to make better pictures” sense.
Salgado was an economist; he worked in Brazil’s Ministry of Finance; then for a group trying to stabilize international coffee markets. So when Salgado finds himself on a tea plantation in Rwanda, I trust that he understands the underlying story very deeply.
Tea plantation worker, Assam, 2008.
When I was on a tea plantation in Assam last summer, I knew the workers’ wages and I understood in at least a basic sense the mechanisms that kept them on the plantation. I strove to make interesting pictures while I was there, but it wasn’t until the train ride back that I bought a newspaper — literally, on the way out of Guwahati — and read a news report about the ongoing bandh in Gorkhaland. It took even more time, back in Austin, for me to read a book about political movements in Assam’s tea plantations, and for my superficial understanding to give way to something deeper — something that I should have striven to understand long before I set foot upon the land.
This is all by way of saying: some of you may know of the big project I’m planning for my thesis; those who know probably know that for a while now I haven’t been entirely sure where to start. Seeing Salgado’s show, among other things, helped me to understand what I need to do first and where I need to go from there.
I think better. I also think lesson: Salgado’s show is up through February 8; if you’re in Austin, you know the end of that sentence.
