The VSCO'd People

I am terrible at projects. While I seek and find inspiration in everything and everyone around me, I am just as quick to embrace the bosom of procrastination. Tiresome combination.

So, to ensure that there exists some momentum, some allusion to progress, I’ve decided to do the work first and see if it can take the shape of something coherent later. Gather the bricks and mortar and then decide what to build, if you please. Smarter people know this to be a dumb, Sisyphean approach to life, best watched from the sidelines with a cold one pressed against your cheek. Thankfully, intelligence never thought it necessary to come knocking at my door.

Let’s just jump to the epilogue shall we? I love film. I try to shoot with it as much as possible. However, logistics don’t allow for it to be a frequent thing and that is a damn shame. Nevertheless, karma wasn’t just going to stand around and do nothing. My hand, over time, melded itself to my phone. A Cybernetic Organism Living Tissue Over Endoskeleton. If you read that in his voice, then you are a good human being and deserve only good things in life.

Film, skittish and the phone, omnipotent – the desire to photograph, eternal. The answer was VSCO. Now, I haven’t used VSCO for any of my digital photographs because processing a digital image with a film preset seems a bit silly. Understandable, of course, but silly to my mind.

Phone photographs processed with the VSCO app didn’t seem so silly. I know. It’s still a digital photograph. Splitting hairs. Or massive hemp ropes. I know. But it’s in the phone. There are some restrictions in play there. I can challenge myself to play with those restrictions and try to produce something interesting. And that’s what I did tried.

Of course, like with Instagram, VSCO fast became another way to process photographs shot solely with the phone camera. In other words, two apps to capture and celebrate the beauty that is Aida.

VSCO Preset – A5 || ISO 64 || Flash OFF || Natural Light

That was till I noticed that I had taken quite a few photographs of people as well. Being people.

Unagi. Brick. Mortar.

Thus, the birth of a “project” – photographing people as they go about peopleing.

Epilogus Finito –

All photos have been shot with a Sony ZR mobile phone and in all probability the next phone will probably be a Sony as well. Why? They make damn good phone cameras and for the sake of continuity.

So, in the tradition of Sisyphus, I shall steadfastly cling to the idea that while you may not possess the blueprints to the grand design when you set out, sometimes, the work itself is the grand design.

The work in progress here.