Friday night in Columbia, MO and there isn’t a damned thing going on. In my room, anyway. I’m sure there’s something going on downtown, but given that I’m friendless and broke in town, that kind of thing will have to wait a little.
I’m wondering tonight what the place of the muse is in today’s society, particularly in American society. Look at Shakespeare – dude had his muse and people don’t have a problem with it. Mention having a muse nowadays, though, and a lot of people more or less think you’re nuts. But I say that for the artist and creative individual, having a muse can still be downright critical. A muse for inspiration. A muse for passion. A muse for everything. There’s something about the generally unrequited nature of a muse that amplifies these things.
I have a muse (there has been a long line of them), though don’t bother asking me who it is. She doesn’t know, she probably won’t ever know. Plus I’m not in the habit of sharing names with people other than her, either, as you never know how word might get around. It’s just better if it’s all kept mysterious, more or less.
Blah. So what else to say tonight? Earlier tonight I finished watching the War Photographer documentary with my parents. This is a documentary about James Nachtwey, who is arguably *the* most important war/human condition photographer that has ever been. The documentary is excellent and a sobering look both at the profession and how Nachtwey does it and about the way things are in the world. I recommend that you go out and find a copy and see for yourself.
Another reason I really need to find a job is because, so long as I’m broke, I can’t do any photography. Given that I’m a photographer, this is bad. I continue to sketch out more and more ideas for phographs, both as individual pieces and as series, but sooner or later I need to start actually executing them. The best image concepts in the world are utterly worthless if they never make it out of the sketchbook. A lot of these things are fairly high-end, though, and as such are not cheap to execute. For example – there is a photo series that’s in the planning stages that is based around different interpretations of the concept of russian roulette. Before I go any farther, I should note that if anyone out there is contemplating ripping off my ideas, you will pay through the nose if you do. Anyway, one of the shots features an array of surgical instruments on a tray as you’d see them laid out in an operating room, among them a rusty, jagged piece of metal. I figure cost of subject materials (surgical instruments, tray, etc) will run about $150 or so. Figure in cost of polaroids for checking lighting, about 8 sheets of 4×5 transparency film, and processing costs for the film, and that’s another $75 worth of materials right there. So we’re up to $225 for the shoot. Which is dirt fucking cheap. What’s that? $225 for a single image is cheap? Sure is. Non-photographers usually balk at the price of high-end shots, and anything for under a grand is peanuts. If I were to hire an assistant for the day, it would cost another $250 minimum just for his services.
So yeah, photography is expensive. I need a job so I can shoot. I need to shoot so I can get my career going and actually shoot freelance.
This career thing is complicated, isn’t it? And it’s not like we ever thought about this when were 5 years old and invariably wanted to be something like a vet or fireman or the president or something. A good thing, too – nothing would kill a child’s enthusiasm for the future like a thorough understanding of cutthroat market practices, income tax, layoffs, etc. Oh, you want to be a doctor, Jimmy? That’s great! Of course, you’ll have to go to school for a decade or so and then pay off a few hundred thousand dollars worth of student loans while working insane hours, constantly at the risk of being sued into bankruptcy for malpractice, but that’s great that you want to be a doctor.
Lots of things going through my mind tonight. Enough typing for now, though. Maybe I’ll post again later tonight. No promises on that.
