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Afterthoughts : Non-Award Winning Photographer
I joked at the beginning of April, using a line from "The Wasteland" that April was going to be the cruelest month. Sure enough it has been. May promises to be even crueler however. But perhaps there's a way out.
This month has been marked with failures. The first failure is that the photograph I submitted to the Valley Cultural Center contest didn't win. Not only did it not win, against inferior works (my opinion of course), but it didn't even get honorable mention. Here is my entry.
Composition
Me (non-award winner), at the contest.
What hurts isn't losing. Art is subjective. Someone looks at a Picasso and might think that it's just a bunch of squiggles and not a masterpiece. So I know what I'm up against. But the one statement that hurt was from someone else in the contest that said of my photograph, "Anyone can take a picture of a flower." That really hurt. To defend myself for a moment, if that were true then everyone's photographs would look like the one above. And I dare say that 99% of the people reading this have not taken a picture like this in their lives. Nor will they. It's no use mentioning that the lighting is natural, and that the composition was thought out, because I purposefully tried to make those things invisible to the viewer. I guess I made them too invisible, because I don't get a reaction from people. Which makes me think of how art should illicit some reaction, even a negative one. Indifference is the worst thing for art. My work causes indifference, not passion.
May 2007
The above was taken three years ago, in 2007. I was about to graduate with my B.A. and I was happy. Not happy that I was leaving campus, but happy that I was finally getting my degree. Three years later I'm failing the hardest class of my masters program. I'm not even sure what this means. It probably means I'll have to repeat the class. It might mean, however, that I'm through. If that's the case then I'm left pondering, "Now what?" And this is where I am right now as I write this. In limbo and in the midst of depression over this whole situation.
I thought about what this means. Before the Buddha became the Buddha he had what you might call a personal crisis. He searched for meaning in his life and questioned its direction. This whole year has brought many questions that I didn't want to answer right away. But now they have come to a head. This moment, right now, is that moment where I'm going to have this crisis and ponder what will be of my life. The Buddha found enlightenment, something I've yet to even get closed to. But perhaps this is why my failures have become so big, in order to force me to question my path.
I won't have school to burden me during the Summer. I've known that I was to embark on a spiritual journey into myself at some point of my life, but I didn't know when. I think that the moment has finally arrived. Like the Buddha I will search within myself to find the answer. The answer is there, I just been too busy to look for it. I've made myself too busy. Lifted of this school burden I will attempt to find the answer.
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