FOREWORD
(first edit)
As photographers, why is it that we do what we do? What inside of us creates the insateable need to photograph? What do we do with our photographs? Where do our photographs belong, if anywhere? Do we belong? Are we photogaphers, or are we simply voyeurs?
The work I create is for myself, and for others. It is for everyone, and no one at all. Critically speaking, I do not seek to create classical images, nor do I seek to please a specific audience. I am constantly learning. Through my photography, I aim to gain knowledge. I aim to ask questions, and I aim to propose new ones. I am fasinated by the world and the people which comprise it. I am constantly asking questions of society, and also of myself. Through my photographs, I am a voyeur and also his subject. I am everything, and nothing at all.
The images contained within this book are those images which have never appealed to a specific audience. Images dismissed due to technical error and lack of control, defying category and replication. These images represent truth and beauty, they represent life and death, and the fleeting moments inbetween.
trashed my second and most fully developed book concept. There goes hours worth of research, grueling MLA formats, first and second ‘Foreword’ edits and hours in the studio playing with still life.
This is photography.
can be productive after all.
I just stumbled upon Vee Speer’s work. This is mind blowing.
(and that is all my sick little head has the capacity to say about it), enjoy.
have been spent with Kelly, Michelle, The Hut boys, and this fine man.
I keep trying to type something here, but nothing can do justice to how amazing Frank Turner is live.
Life is the strangest thing. To know the people I know and to love and hate them respectively (and simultaneously) and as close and as far as they may be. Last night I received text messages from Calgary and Vancouver. Constantly I receive messages from the UK and last night I received phone calls from down the street and LA.
This is my life.
While we’re on the topic of memories…
I miss so many things about home sometimes. I miss all the nights at kb with Brent and Trevor and Blake and the boys… When I couldn’t carve and I learned to keep up with them. All the nights hiking park in the dark. How they never treated me like a girl, how I was always pushed harder and faster to 50-50 that god damn box in that amazing side trail mini park. I miss all the hilarious nights at the skate park when Nick and Steve tried to teach me how to drop in and never made fun of me for how awful I was. That stupid Cannon deck I trekked all the way home from San Diego that year. I really miss that board…
I miss showing up to school with rips in my jeans and blood on my face from spending the entire morning in the skate park before school… Trying to accomplish something and getting nowhere. How my mom would let the boys in before I got home, how they always got dinner like they were family. I still cannot believe my mother put up with that shit… And how she still tells people “Kira never got along with girls.”
I miss my boys more than anything- which is probably only fitting.
And I love that I just got a call from the hut. I love what’s yet to come…
Lately, I’m starting to learn what I really need/want out of life. Not even in terms of some big, final life goal. It’s more about where I am now and the person I’ve become. I miss late nights with Nick and Steve, I miss all the hilarious adventures that became of my time spent at home, in that basement room with all of the guys, just laughing at nothing and everything at once. I miss how awesome my mom always has been and still is for putting up with all of my antics. I was never a bad kid, but I’m sure I could have been better. Sure I miss the 5am/weekend roadtrips with Jess, her jet black bedroom and fightng over who got to use msn to talk to far-away boys. I’ll forever miss my first year here, not knowing who I was- and all of those awful nights that Phil told me I was becomming a different person than he’d fallen for all those years before.
But who I am now.. What all of that hell- what those terrible friends and broken bridges and regrettable mistakes… It’s brought me to where I am today. I hate this city for what it’s done to me, but maybe that’s just me realizing that the only thing this city has done is isolate feelings; it’s acted as a filter for all and any negativity. I’ve finally been able to put all of that in the past and focus on what’s real.
All those nights with strangers in bars, I called those people my friends- I threw the term around so often. This city will break you if you’re not careful.
I really don’t know where I am, but I know where my friends are. These pretentious kids, they’ll grow up to be nothing. They continue to judge, but I refuse to let this city create a monster of what I’ve worked so hard to become.
I have no clear direction, and I’m finally okay with that.
