Over at A Proposal, I provide some context for my last post, which, despite my efforts, ended on a much more ambiguous note than I’d intended.

In Montreal, for the first time, I began to actively seek out and take pictures of people. Before this, my primary interest had been urban photography. Deserted buildings, bright dumpsters, bricked-in alleyways — these were the things that fascinated me, because of the opportunity they gave me to disorient notions of beauty and urban geography. And being a photographer in spaces like those also troubles notions of a clean divide between the public and the private.

But then in Montreal, people sought me out and asked me to take their pictures. It went to my head. Montreal is a city full of people constantly on display. Its people take a good picture. So I was surrounded by beautiful people who wanted beautiful pictures, and I was happy to oblige. I became a little giddy.

But I’ve been thinking a lot these days about human bodies and a camera’s relation to them. I’ve been trying to write about it too, and have been getting stuck. I want to draw a parallel between a proprietorial relationship to language and the potentially limiting effect of a camera (at least in terms of the photographer’s relationship to the models/bodies). There is something so surgical about the process that I have vague, inarticulate concerns …

Meanwhile, I have half a dozen concepts swirling in my head, and am terribly excited to start recruiting models to help in their execution in about 2 weeks.