Monday, October 20, 2008

cleaning out my old sent box - my life in emails

It's not easy seeing where your Life has been - no better method of "seeing" its direction but through cleaning out your old emails in your sent box. Seeing emails dated while living in Spain, later emails upon my arrival in Eugene were a revelation; even more those emails after my move to the Bay Area.

Then I've reading through the other stuff.... emails to models hoping {begging} for a foto session and being refused. People and others who posed for others of lesser abilities photographically, and never posing with me. Models who were excited about an upcoming foto session with me, and never showed up... flakes who were just like snowflakes... appeared from seemingly out-of-the-sky, then disappeared and with just a few words here and there, gone as if they never existed. Others who even bragged about their opportunity with me - called me an artist - and were so "looking forward" to my photographing them... they too like leaves on a dying tree.... fell and disappeared.

Virtual letters from people whom I knew to be ~ thought I ~ good friends and then disappeared without a trace when I moved to the USA. Friends that were and later friends I knew and had, but no longer... never without a reason. Thy just died virtually and left no forwarding soul to contact.....

Yes, that and this now has been my life... sad and depressing. I don't know how many times I've been told that they "love my imagery and can't wait to be photographed by such an artistic artist" and then I never hear from them again... It's depressing when this happens on such a routine basis that one wonders if the life they are supposedly living is real.... or not.

I got upset before - not any longer - when I see someone whom I wanted to photograph - pose for someone else. I don't have any money to pay models and I get turned down by any and everyone. Yes, quite sad but who cares.... they have their life and don't care about how I feel.... later I'll see through their modeling website that they had posed free for some other photographer, who had/has less vision than I... the pictures being little less than studio snapshots a 5th grader could've snapped, or nudes so horrid who but an idiot would display them? But they do and they have...

I remember once a "friend" - no longer as she abandoned me too - wanted me to do a portrait for her.... bragged to all her friends and family of this upcoming portrait session with me. Months later I saw her casually on the street and asked what had happened with that need for a portrait.... she just shrugged and said she went to a studio and had them done. I asked if she liked the results and she told me no, then proceeded to describe each and every little detail of WHY she didn't like them. I told her she shouldn't be telling me as I was not her photographer - she should tell that studio.... she stomped off and I never saw her again.

Now it's difficult to talk to people about my photography - I am always wondering: will they be like the rest and just say things that are nice, but the truth is.... they will disappear like the others....

It happens so often....

I've often wondered should I give up this hate/love relationship with photography ~ how I love photography but it and the people who see my work hate me and my images so much as to avoid me so. I remember how some people would stare at me as they would a fly when I told them I was an "artistic" photographer; after a few days they were awed as they described how they felt so together with the beauty I had "captured". They were agasp when I told them I made very little money from my photography..... they too promptly disappeared as do the others.

As I write this, my camera is again in the shop for the same problem it's had three previous times over the past few months and I haven't even had it a whole year! Have previously tried to stay away from a camera, but tis difficult because it's like chopping off your hands, your feet and walking blind into the darkness....

But they don't care.... I feel so bitter at times but who cares.... to go begging online to create pictures for someone.... If I had the money to pay for a model they would probably still turn me down.... I am "so" artistic they don't see how I feel when they turn me down and go to some other less-experienced photographer. They don't see my hurt when I see their newest cheesecake pictures taken by some guy with a camera who does his work more to see nude women than anything else, and makes more money in one day through his photography than I have made in the last five years.

They don't care how I feel.....

Right now I am listening to flamenco guitar music off the internet, listening to the spanish-style music all day and wishing I were back in my small apartment in warmer friendlier Spain... not restricted within a cell of so many feet and with no room for my clothes, my things and my memories. That I must relocate things each and every day just to be able to move around and do things ~ for that reason often I cannot find things.

This is not Life......

1 comment:

Maria said...

But you know, and it sounds so very cliche to say, things can change. And, sometimes, you never know what may get unearthed, as long as one stays open.

Go home. Come back to this side. Things just seem to look and feel better here.