Getting my mojo back

Well, I've been unemployed for a week and a half now, and I'm starting to get over the blind terror & dread that's been chasing me since I resigned. I've put in a bunch of job applications, and am now heartily sick of writing cover letters. On the plus side, though, I'm starting to get my creativity back.

It's been a while since I felt like making anything; clothes, photos, art, you name it. Even the pictures I made while I was away are mainly holiday snaps; while I started to feel the stirrings of interest while I was away, for my usual fascination with airports, and a series on coffee-shop life in Malaysia, it was nearly the end of the trip before I had an idea in my mind other than 'it will be nice to have a picture of this'.

Traditional coffee shops in Malaysia are little mini-food courts called Kopitiams, full of strong, sweet coffee and tasty foods - and people. They fascinate me!

Now I'm home, though, and not stressed and overwhelmed and curmudgeonly from a combination of work and uni, the creative juices are stirring (I almost said dripping), and I'm having ideas of images I want to make, and things I want to show. I'll be taking my gear to uni tonight, so I can make some night images on the way home - I'm thinking about pinhole photos of King St, and some pictures of those comfortably Victorian terraces made strange by night.

I'm also thinking about finishing off the latest chocolate bunny sequence - I'm partly there, but am now wanting to pull out the hairdryer to melt the bunnies into strange communions.

I'm starting to think again about melting bunnies...

I'm very glad - it's always a hit to my self-esteem when I can't create something (and my self-esteem isn't the steadiest to start with, which doesn't help). So it's nice to feel the fingers twitching and the mind tossing around ideas, and even nicer to feel like I might have something to say.

So stay tuned!

Tropical Paradise

Back in November 2008, the Houseguest and I went for a week's holiday in Fiji. As you can see, it's taken me a long while to get to the photos from the trip, for a number of reasons, really.



The main one is that I just didn't like most of the images I made there, and it was only this morning that I realised why. Normally, when I photograph, I'm trying to create an image that reflects the place as it is, not just how we mythologise it (and yes, many caveats about subjectivity; we can debate the concept of reality and images some other time). In Fiji, though, everything seemed to me to have been created for tourist consumption. Even the culture of the locals was nearly impossible to get through past the screen of stories and 'Bulas!' and created idylls to get the tourist dollars in. I suspect, from my very limited viewpoint, that even the locals don't have a clear view any more of the aspects of life that are genuinely theirs, and the ones they created for show.

I suspect that has to do with the area we stayed in; we were in a resort-ey area of the most touristy town, so it shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did. Still, it made me uncomfortable.



Still, when I came to sort the photos, I found myself able to walk a line between tourist-cliches, and an actual sense of people and place. I'm reasonably happy with these. And I'd like to go back to Fiji some time to see if I can get to know it properly.



I tried to do a fancy flash gallery for this, so I could embed the slideshow. It, uh, didn't work as expected, sadly. Click through if you'd like to browse the gallery for more images, and I'll keep working on it.