video in progress.....

This is a rough clip from a video piece I'm working on. The final version will be in HD resolution for projection, and will be 9-12 Minutes long. I shot all the images in this clip this summer in Mumbai. The finished video will also include scenes from many other parts of India, as well as lots of graphics, popular commercial and religious imagery, postcards, etc. from around India. Much editing to do!

fast India clip

fast India clip, originally uploaded by scoopneil.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between photographs and memories. The thing that has stopped me really about writing a blog has to do with the specificity of both. Rather than talk about the things that are on my mind, or post the images that I capture from day to day, I wonder about the appropriateness of sharing private memories in a semi public forum. Some of my favorite readings are in the journals of Anaïs Nin, but I can't help but wonder how the subjects of those narratives would have felt had their most intimate moments been splashed out on the internet for all to see. Images are so much more personal than that, and so much less as well. So what we do in a public forum either becomes a formalist exercise in light and color, or else a sort of professional selection of images that are deemed appropriate, and somehow express our feelings in a general way, or tell a story of what we have seen of others' lives, without revealing too intimately our own in a specific way. This is called art, or documentary photograpy, a poetry of images, done in good taste. I wonder about this. Of course the boundary of good taste is ever shifting. Now it's fashinable to post images of whomever you've just slept with, even mid act. Thanks to Nan Goldin and your many spritual children for sharing your memories, and giving me the opportunity to ponder the nature of trust, and privacy, and its relation to intimacy. I've always loved that work, and sure, I have my own photostream of a similar nature. It's just that you are not going to see it. We are going to have to stick here to the things that I remember seeing and was lucky enough to capture in film or pixels, that bring about the atmosphere and memories of those more personal moments, which I'll try to keep to myself, thanks, as much as possible in the narcissistic environment of a personal blog. My photography has been largely more about the places and people to which my curiosity about others brings me, anyway. The camera has given me a way to look at the world that is outside of myself, and freeze it long enough to ponder.

_DSC5917

_DSC5917, originally uploaded by scoopneil.

I don't know this spam guy on the scooter, or the woman behind him with the camera, or the smiling dude on the right in the hat. It's just a bunch of strangers at the NY State Fair, and quite random that this should be my first blog posting.