I'm trying to finish the summer tying up loose ends -- unfinished projects, books, and ideas. It's always hard to get my head around the passage of time, so I'm often struggling to come to grips with the things I was looking forward to being now behind me. It's frightened me how in the past few years my memory has only registered events erratically, changing its timeline to cater to my emotional state. I don't want to lose whole chunks of my mental representation of the past just because I didn't care to think about them when I was retracing my personal narrative. If events in my life are painful enough for me to forget them even while they're occurring, I need to make changes in the way I experience things if not the things I experience.
There's no way to get around the gap between experience and memory, but I'd like to at least have tokens, personal symbols, of where I've been and what I've thought. Images are not that for me yet. I don't make enough and I wait too long to have them processed... they're more closely associated with the moment I get them back, entering the story only in my first (and later) impressions of them. I would like to make picture-taking a regular part of my life, but it comes in and out at the whim of my budget, free time, and the functionality of my cameras. I know I just need to work, to not worry about the money (there are plenty of less important things I spend more on) or the quality of the pictures. The longer I spend not making any, the longer it takes to produce something I like.
I shot a lot in Greece, a lot of expired film that I now regret using because it doesn't show the real colors, which were so incredible. But then again it's been long enough that the memories themselves are paling and what I cared about then is mostly submerged beneath the intervening months.
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