I decided to delete my social media accounts a little while back. Part of the reason was due to the climate of ramped-up tech censorship we’re seeing on such a one-sided scale. It’s one thing for private companies arbitrarily deciding who they want to deplatform, it’s another thing to watch so many people openly supporting such censorship. The other reason I decided to delete my accounts is because I know that social media is not only a negative influence on my life and my productivity but I can see how it is turning other people into utter assholes.
I don’t want to get into a whole treatise on the evils of social media, I just wanted to preface this before I talk about how I want to move forward, seeing as how I’m still trying to figure that part out.
Because that’s the question I’m faced with right now. That’s the question anyone faces after deleting social media.
Now what?
My social media is gone. How do I promote my photography and music? Well, as it turns out, I have a band website and a personal website, so the answer seems to be staring me in the face. But again, how do I drive traffic to my site so people can see what I have to offer?
For now, I’ll just concentrate more on long-form blogs and even the occasional video post.
By the way, if you want to see my most recent video, you can do so by visiting here my YouTube channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/c/JayLamm
Anyway, I’ve been saying for a while that I’ve wanted to marry my photography and my writing. One plan was to post my short stories along with custom images to go along with key scenes. This has proven a little difficult because the short stories I’ve written require certain locations that I don’t have access to. However, for the time being, I’ve been taking some eclectic photos and decided to start posting them here. These images will be accompanied by my thoughts on what either inspired the image or what the finished image inspired in me. Sometimes the accompanying text will seem random and rambling; sometimes it’ll appear to be more based in coherent reality. Writing like this was something I used to do many years ago when I would just grab a piece of paper and write something, anything, just to get something off my chest. That’s really the thing here. Sometimes I feel like I just have to get something off my chest. Otherwise, I’ll have this idea, notion, or point of view that just haunts me until I blurt it out. As a result, I had amassed thousands of these little pieces of paper with ramblings on them.
So, here we go.
Let’s start off with an image I call…
“Gerta Regret: They’re Coming For You”
She liked the sound of birds chirping, of bones breaking, and the whistling squeal of tires from off far away. When she came around here for the first time we would all commit her face to memory—those intense, bright eyes always seemed to fix on you, stay on you, never quite leave you. But when she left the room, we forgot her name. What she had said to us would soon be forgotten. Where she was going and why she arrived seemed to slip away as she passed into the distance.
Our wallets filled with feathers when we returned around to work.
The second time she passed through, we felt a pang of fear in our guts. Her breath smelled of shark’s blood and her words didn’t make much sense.
She took one of us away with her and we soon forgot his name. But when the doors clicked closed, our voices rose and we felt blessed for what was in store.
The last time I saw her, my friends were all on fire. She waved behind a window, smiling in an office without a door.
“There you are,” I said as the bird’s beak pierced my inner ear.
She said, “Patience rewards the sickest dog who slumps away in fear.”
**I shot this image at f/4, 1/250th sec, ISO-80, in my kitchen using a strobe about 45 degrees off to the subject’s left-hand side. The bird and background were comped in later. I had this image in my head for what I wanted but I didn’t quite know what it meant. I just knew I wanted Gina in full makeup, smiling while looking off into the distance, with some garish, nonsensical top on—hence the hair shirt. After I wrote the text for it I realized it was my take on the looming threat of cancel culture, how it ends up eating its own, and how the rules it subscribes to will arbitrarily change depending on its mood. **
“One Day Soon”
…and when her legs became tired, she found herself by a tree in the dead of cold. Its leaves would return one day. One day soon.
She knew that the dead grass beneath her feet would be green again. She knew the frozen ground would thaw. She knew the barren branches above were still worthy, still serving the purpose for a perch to a bird that would fly away one day.
The fog too would pass and give way to blue beyond. If only. There was no doubt.
She knows she isn’t crazy, though it is their deepest wish to make others believe she is so.
**I shot this at f/10, at 1/100 sec, and ISO-100. The tree is located right outside my house, and across the street in this large baseball field. I would pass by it on walks and just liked the way it looked with no leaves. When I took the shot I knew that a lot of post-processing work would be needed. There were plenty of overhead wires in the shot, with a fence and football field in the background. So, I had to go in there and mask out all the wires and extraneous details that mixed in with the branches. Basically, the idea was to have a single person, by a single tree with a single bird that can be found somewhere in the branches. I wanted the sky and ground to be almost entirely obscured by fog and overcast clouds. Just a hint of light blue sky can be seen through the clouds and you can also see just a hint at how the ground falls off to the left. **
“Gasoline Dialect”
I see everything as a fire. If you pull me into whatever circle that’s reveling at a blaze, I’ll do what I can do throw gas on it.
If you come to me with a positive fire of good clean energy, then I’ll steep you with praise, congratulate, and let you burn a bit brighter.
But if you pull me in with some bullshit fire, cooking up some crazy amount of poisonous pyre, then go screw. I’ll toss some gasoline on there for you, too.
I’ll gladly help you shine or go up in smoke.
**Shot after shooting a belly dance video, this image was captured at f/4, 1/250 sec, at ISO-80 with a strobe light and colored LED hair light at side. This is one of those images that I took and really didn’t know what the point of it was at the time. Gina wanted to have a tongue photo with fire coming up off the tip of it. After some trial and error I settled on compositing in a real fire flame and created the smoke and embers from scratch.**
But isn’t that the way it is today?
On social media, people either take the position of world’s biggest troll, doubling down on their stance, throwing verbal jabs at anyone who doesn’t see it their way; or, people take this fake, nice persona in an effort to be the “bigger person,” a position far worse than the first.
I say, toss gasoline on any conversation you’re roped in on.
At least they’ll remember you.
I hope you enjoyed these images and what I wrote for them. Maybe you took the time to read and look at these on your lunch break, while using the bathroom, or before going to sleep at night. In any case, if you’ve read through all this and took the time to look at what I worked on, I appreciate it. Please feel free to pass it along as I’ll be posting more of this stuff in the days to come.
