A great deal has happened over the past month. It’s interesting to be entering what everyone calls the “real world” at new years. Getting myself settled into my new routine feels like I’m setting up a new years resolution, when really I’m just setting up my life after school. I’ve graduated from college, purchased my own large format camera, and been working on setting up an approximation of a darkroom set up in my apartment. There have been a few challenges, among them figuring out how to get silver nitrate stains off bathroom walls (bleach, as it turns out, works wonderfully for this.)

I’ve started getting more hours at work now that I’m out of school. I’m still part time, but I’m a less poor part time laborer. This suits me just fine as it leaves me plenty of time for writing, photography, and gaming. I’ve been working on a few projects on the writing front, but I’ve been pretty inactive since finals. I picked up bookbinding for fun, and have a few nice results. Haven’t shot much since finals, but I’ll be getting back to that soon, now that things have settled down somewhat after the holidays.

One of my goals is to start posting on here more often, including updates on my life, what I’m working on at the time, and photos of my developing equipment collection. To that end, here are a few photos of things I’ve been working on:

This is my latest darling, a Calumet 4x5 view camera. I purchased the lens separately, built the lens board, and put it all in working order. It’s all metal meaning it's heavy, but sturdy. It’s actually too heavy for my tripod, as when I put it on the tripod it bent the head of the tripod. (it should be noted I have a cheap plastic tripod that I’ve been using for years with smaller cameras, and was never intended for a camera of this size.)

This camera hasn’t received a name yet, but I’m open to suggestions.

"Bell Book and Candle" the first successful tintype made with the new camera. This one was lit entirely by floor and table lamps, shot in the middle of the night Christmas Eve. It took several hours to get the exposure right, and I finally settled on a 20 min exposure time at f4.5. I varnished the plate the next morning, framed it Christmas night, and gave it away as part of a Yankee Swap the next day with my Fiancée’s family. 

We matted it in a classic decorative Matte my Fiancée made and Tea stained that just happened to crop in the corners enough to cover that dark shadow. She made the matte before the plate was finished, and I was thrilled when I saw how it fit. 

I've been working on building a role-playing game system on and off for a few months now. The basic mechanics are all worked out at this point, but I realized that in order to play test this game I would need a world to play in, and that most game systems that have a distinctive flavor also come with a well developed setting for gamers to use. To that end, I've begun building an appropriate setting to showcase my system. This is the world map I made a few days back. Over the next few weeks I'll be writing profiles on each of these nations and various organizations that are influential in this world, as well as a bit of the history of the world.

As I mentioned above, I’ve taken up bookbinding. I saw a tutorial about it online a few weeks back and thought about all the scrap matte board I had lying around after cutting windows for my photographs, and decided I’d try my hand at using the scraps for book covers. My fiancée volunteered some scrap fabric left over from old projects, and fabric pieces she’d been given but decided not to use, and I started putting together books. I then took old prints, misprints, and various other photographs I didn’t want to keep as such, and began looking for things that would make interesting inside covers. In this case, I used two contact prints on RC paper, made off 4x5 negatives I shot a few years ago.

I would like to take this opportunity to discuss a problem I’ve been observing with the arts community in general, and my college more specifically. Accessibility.  Art has in many ways become something that can only be appreciated by other artists. I see work on a regular basis that requires an education in art history to even begin to understand because it involves so many allusions to former concepts, ideals and movements within the art world. One cannot simply make an image anymore without someone else interjecting that it would be more conceptually interesting if done in the style of an art movement that died 40+ years ago. There are so many works that you have to understand the ideology of an entire movement in order to understand, and the majority of the population lacks the time, interest, and energy to educate themselves about the history of artistic movements.

What’s worse, is that I’m beginning to suspect that this problem is symptomatic of an art education. Because we know about these movements, we want to play off their ideas, forgetting that other people don’t know about them. There was a time when art was current and relevant without requiring that the viewer be particularly well educated to understand it. This was because the art referenced contemporary subjects rather than historical or literary figures from a century before. Artists have become so wrapped up in their own conversation that they have stopped inviting laymen to engage in their dialog. We wonder about the shrinking market for artwork, but we’re the ones responsible for alienating the vast portion of the marketplace.

I see writers everyday that through their studies have lost their love of reading. Who admit that they can’t just pick up a book and get lost in the story anymore. I see artists who when they look at a piece of new art immediately begin analyzing it before they have a chance to experience and explore a human reaction to it. I posit that if we want our work to be relevant to the general population, we must first return to being a part of that population again. We must remember what first inspired us, what filled us with wonder when we were part of that huddled mass of unenlightened looking up at the products of the arts and gasping in awe at what we saw. We need to remember the visceral reaction we first experienced when viewing grand oil paintings, or reading Fantasy and Science fiction books. We need to remember the wonder of turning the pages to find out what happens next, and the experience of spending a month reading a good book because we don’t want it to be over.

We must remember, and we must produce work that is accessible at that level, then get it in front of as many eyes as possible. This is how we can inspire the world to pay attention to the arts again, not by shocking them but by inspiring them. We don’t need to confuse, confound, educate or indoctrinate them. We need to inspire them, fill them with wonder and amazement and make them want to educate themselves.