Sagebrush Cafe Press: Printed Collage Series
The series has been continued…fourteen pieces in this printed collage series have been made so far, all of them available at Sagebrush Cafe (except for those which have already been sold, of course). The next step is to take a selection of the pieces and turn them into postcards. At least I think that is the next idea.
I like the premise and the picture of offering these collage works as postcards. It makes sense to me to go that route. The one worry I have is that, for a while, I’ll have five hundred postcards printed and pristine and kind of just sitting around at my house until they start selling at the cafe.
With a dozen images though, and some interest so far, the card set idea has some real appeal. That way the work becomes more affordable, more spread out, and the whole “plastic” idea of it can become a meta-plastic-idea: words + paper on one side and a little note written on the other side then sent in the mail…
The surface elements become encrusted with substance.
Actually, I don’t know if that phrase really makes a whole lot of sense, but I like it and I’m going with it.
This little series may be coming to an end. Then again, it may just be beginning. It’s hard to tell, but after a dozen pieces and quite a bit of satisfying fun I don’t know how many more of these will be forthcoming. With this series I feel I’ve found a simplicity of style and production that make for works that are easy – to understand and to make.
It’s hard to predict where these might go, given the limit of fingers I have and how many of them already seem to be stuck each in a pot of their own…
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…not that anyone but me will notice if this is the end of the series, of course. This is a small scale operation after all. But I’d like to share the end of this process (or the middle(?)) since I also shared the beginning.
the color of words – short story kind of movie
This story, “the color of words”, was written for an ongoing, online collaborative photo-fiction project called Euclid’s Negatives. You can read the entire text there and see the photos that helped to inspire the story.
In this case, the photos were taken first and the story written in response. Once you get into the story it becomes obvious that the content of the story is based on more than the images alone. The story grows out of experience, life-long fixations, out of the soil of the soul, like all stories, and the photos serve as a set of anchors, attaching the life of the story to the “real world”, the visual world.
That connective nature of the photography is one of the most interesting things about the Euclid’s Negatives project, for me. Fiction, of itself, exists in an associative space where ideas and past and present and dreams, feelings, half-articulated notions of self and being and the whole lot get to stand and float on their own power, like astronauts in zero gravity.
In normal conversation these things have to be propped up. But in a story, they stand on their own.
When we couple fiction with photography, something happens to render these abstractions more concrete. Something similar happens to the photos which were once silent, observant; momentary. With the fiction surrounding them, the photos become narrative. They take part in a larger context and gain a voice.
…anyway, this video was born out of the Euclid’s Negatives project. Rheagan E. Martin‘s photography kicked things off. You can see his images in the video, mixed in with images from Wikimedia Commons. To find out which are which, you can take a look at the story in its original form HERE.
Making the video version of the story is part of a larger project and process for me as I gear up to create/produce more video-oriented work.
[comments welcome. Cheers.]
