Today is July 31, 2023. This site has been up for several years and I've added nothing to it since these first few sets in 2018 and 2019; rambles 100 through 105. I have captured tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of photos over the last 23 years, the majority of which no one has ever seen and which I have seen only once. I remember a few handfuls of these photos, their subjects, and what equipment I captured them with. Many of them are still on their CF and SD cards. Others are on cloud drives, thumb drives, external magnetic hard drives, DVDs, CDs, and even Zip drives (if they still work). Though the majority of my 3000+ film exposures were lost in 2002, I have a few prints from assignments I completed at the College of Southern Idaho from 2000 to 2002. And that is my total collection: a few recent completed sets, remnants of 3000 lost analog frames, and many thousands of images I have, essentially, never seen. So...
What about me? I was born in the late 1970s. I'm weird and inconsistent in my behavior; outgoing one day, withdrawn the next. I'm an unusual person (I watch zombie movies and chase birds and butterflies) with an unusual past (a childhood in the California redwoods and young formative years in the high desert of Idaho). But it's fairly mundane. I'm not a shaker or mover. I'm not ambitious. But I have an uncommon family, I've lived in uncommon places, done uncommon things, and have uncommon ways of thinking. That may sound unremarkable. But I've also experienced tragedy that most people will never face. This has all contributed to my art over the last 20 years. I just haven't nailed down how.
While that relationship is yet unclear, to get an idea of what you'll find here, the image data I feel the strongest urge to create are nature (especially macro and landscapes), wildlife (mostly birds and butterflies), intense weather (though I haven't had a chance to storm-chase... yet), city streets and their people and homes and stories, me and my son (a wild, energetic, lovable, boy with Downs), flat abstract form (a la Aaron Siskind), overgrowth and decay as natures glorious reclamation of things made by man, a random assortment of miscellaneous nonsense, and photos of people with interesting stories, unconventional beauty, or who paid me to take their pictures but the final outcomes were explorations of form as much as they were conventional portraits.
How does it all tie together? I'll tell you when I figure it out. It shouldn't be too much longer. Though I say that, It's taken me over 45 years to understand what many people grasp in their first 20. I'm no genius. So don't hold your breath. But I hope to get there by 2024.
To do this I will be exploring images and journals I've recorded over the past 20+ years and posting selections from both as they correlate chronologically. I will be moving forward and backward, from 2019, in no particular order. Many will be posted as "rambles" (excursions, walks, hikes, and explorations of specific places or subjects). Some will be groups of assignments from art school that were successes or utter failures (possibly along with their contemporary attempts at personal rectification). A few will be selections from portrait gigs that I'm particularly fond of (I had to make SOME money with photography). Others will be conceptual projects that were started with every enthusiastic intention and then abandoned.
The only overarching continuity here is the discontinuity of being enrambled. It is the inexhaustible grip of wanderlust. It is being enraptured with the simple things in life, only scrambled. It is the inability to efficiently write, talk, or think in a straight line. It is the inescapable gravitation toward the odd that most people easily or readily ignore. Though, as I've aged, I've become fairly adept at normalcy (some may argue that point), the reality for me, as I assume and hope it is with many others, is that acceptable social and academic norms are far beyond the pull of the singularity that is being enrambled. YEAH, I KNOW IT'S NOT A REAL WORD SPELLCHECKER!
And FYI, I'm changing my original "ramble" naming convention to be F/BE.YYYY.MM.DD.# instead of simple serial numbers. The prefix marks the transition from "before enrambled" (BE) to "forevermore enrambled" (FE) for my entire work. That's not to say I was never enrambled before. I always have been. This is when I accepted and owned this state of existence. As much as it separates the times before and after Covid-19 it differentiates between the young and old "epochs" of my life.
And, of course, as it is one of the main symptoms of being enrambled, this will probably all change again at some point.
Cheers!