Photobook.

Like everyone else with an iPhone and Instagram, I have convinced myself that I am a fantastic ameutur phorographer. With an eye toward making a photo book of the quality one might find at the neighborhood Urban Outfitters, I have been checking photo books out of the library every day and teaching myself the genre of the photo book and let me tell you (as a writer), I am very much disappointed by what is going on there. The brutal dictatorship of the joyless black and white - while not total - is near total.

The other day I checked out a book called WHY IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE IN FOCUS: Modern Photography Explained and while I fancy myself an egalitarian, I am left with the cancerous black humor of one who wants simply to yell, “STOP IT! JUST STOP IT!”

Much like my father at a Jackson Pollock exhibition, I feel the urge to to scream, “I feel like I am taking crazy pills!”

Perhaps it does not have to be in focus, but perhaps it should be.

Now let’s be clear, I do attend a second tier research university, have no formal photography training, and am what my mother refers to as “artsy” (by which she secretly means,”I so hope he is gay”. My mother desperately wants at least one of her sons to be gay and I am the most likely candidate due to my love of scarves and my propensity to blog about the failings of photo books. I am however not, sorry mom), and I guess I am simply a person who is upset by the unrelatable quality of most of the photo books I have seen lately. Perhaps the selection at my library is just lacking. Whatever the case may be, I am soldering forth with the photobook idea. 

In my defense, I do imagine it as being something more than only a photobook. I look forward to writing the captions and notes. I’m envisioning a sort of lunatic and lie-filled travel narrative to inform the pictures. I haven’t written it yet though because I am still gathering up photos. Today though I have taken the first real step on the road to creation: I have made a folder in Google Drive.

Tellingly, I put it inside of my “Writing” folder.

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