The Work II

I skyped with my parents the other day. For some reason, my dad insisted he hold his iPad so that I could only see the print on his t-shirt. Oh, parents. He also asked me when I'm going to get to work. I'm working all the time, dad! I'm thinking real hard and that's work. I'm working my ass off!

Well, he was sort of kidding, I guess. He's just that sort. I'm also working for reals, taking photos everyday.


Yesterday the model, Ayame came from Fukuoka. The situation was a bit nervous because I am always a nervous person, but in the end everything went fine. She was such a sweet person and so accommodating, not minding when I asked her to journey into the scary bamboo forest with even scarier spiders and me randomly having shouting fits because of the spiders. There's a kind of secret shrine in the forest, it's quite beautiful. We went through it, deeper into this kind of a small canyon carved by water but now dried into a hollow, curving path beneath incredibly tall trees.

The bamboo forest makes really scary sounds. Clonking and rustling and random leaves falling on your head, scaring you half to death. The residency manager Katsura told me the noises are perfectly normal, when I told her about going location scouting the other day and then running out of the forest like a bat out of hell when I started hearing rustling noises. It sounded like a big animal coming at me through the forest and I wasn't about to stay and see what was coming. But I guess it's just the trees.

Anyway, we went to the forest and then to the beach. The beach was gorgeous in the dying sunlight, with a breeze surprisingly fresh for Itoshima. We took a lot of photos. I have a really bad habit of just clicking away because I'm afraid I'll miss something. I think it's because I do a lot of event photography, where people are moving around a lot and you have to try to get as many frames as possible to get the best shot mid-movement. With staged photos, my trigger-happiness just means more work selecting the final photos.

I always say every phase of creating photos is the hardest part, but this is really the hardest part. Choosing what photos will be in the exhibition is really effing exhausting. At this part, I can make or break my final work. Do I choose the photos I intuitively like best? What if choose photos that are just visually pleasing but don't have enough substance? What if I choose photos I feel tell the best story but aren't so visually impressive? What if my exhibition isn't at all cohesive?

I feel like a competitor on Project Runway! Tim Gunn, where are you to help me! I wish I could show my work to a professional and get some help, but I'm a bit afraid of asking the other resident artists because I don't want to waste their time. However, I think I might ask anyway. They can tell me no if they're too busy.


The hardest part is probably that I might have to make the selection today because Katsura is off for the weekend and I might not be able to order from the Japanese print shop without her. So she's helping me order tomorrow and I only have to hope I can get something done by then. I have some foam panels I will use as the mount for the photos and I can just print some photos at the local 7-11 and glue them on to the panels, but that might not look so high-quality. So my best option is to order now. If I leave it until Katsura comes back from her short vacation, the pictures might not make it back here in time for my exhibition.

Wish me luck!