I always thought it was clever that when talking about my favorite creative act (taking/making photos) that I described photography as an act of deletion. In putting that rectangular frame around an object, landscape, animal, person, you are essentially removing everything outside the frame.
With so much fervor of the “power” of generative AI to create imagery, would it’s parallel description be of filling a rectangular frame with some retched regurgitation of …. but it’s relation to the world outside that frame is null.
Sadly no one seemed to ever confirm my cleverness in my “framing” of photography, and indeed there is much more to the process that composing the view. But here it is in the evening, Cori and I are looking at the photos we both took of the same sunset, but each choosing a different frame.
And when I go back to the act, the action of going about the world with a camera, it’s the participatory act of noticing detail, light, color, unique juxtapositions in the world I inhabit. And as my own neurons flow (or so I guess), I remember back to a noticing pattern I stumbled onto in the very first days of the open version of the DS106 digital storytelling course/experience, literally day’s after Jim Groom blogged his wild idea.
I’m talking about way back in December 2010.
Oh yeah, more old web memories.
The other thing I was doing then was training to run my first half marathon. While on trail in Mesa, Arizona, thinking about the same time the idea of DS106 and also how much I hated running, I stopped in my tracks.
Right on the side of the trail was a sign with a 106 on it.
It just appeared. I took a photo, and later added some wild effects to it. It was 1 of 506 of these. Not that I knew it.
I could write about this noticing, what i meant, what I saw as a powerful act to choose a single thing- a number, a word, an object, and look for i everywhere. Having this in mind was not my sole object when I had a camera out, but it bubbled in the back of my mind to keep my attention on.
Except.
Apparently I already wrote this post in 2018!
And in the 6 years, I added only 50 more to the pile. I could “generate” a whole bunch of reasons, but who cares?
So I am back at it in 2024!
And the thing is with 106s, sometimes it is just sitting here- in a room number, a phone number, road sign. Other times I “make” it with arranging sticks, berries. And then there’s playing around the edges when it is backwards, or I resort to arithmetic.
The beauty of doing DS106 is you just make your own rules. This is something that slipped by back in the day when many people were foaming about MOOCs.
So I am back on the 106 photo prowl. They will first go to my flickr stream tagged 106, but I am toying as well with crossposting to pixelfed and even made a new collection for, well now, just one 106 photo.
Like my clever concept of photography as an act of deletion, I’d bet even fewer than (0?) people really are impressed by my chasing 106 images.
And that is just a good reason ro keep doing it. It’s my thing.
Featured Image: Collage of two screenshots of my own flickr photos tagged 106. I can call this on released under CC0.
I like the creative hooks that keep us attentive to the world.
Kevin
I love that you do this and share this.
Which one is the 106th of the 106 collection?
Kevin
Hah, brilliant question. I had so count 😉 So from my link to all photos tagged 106 I could sort them in reverse chronological order but could not find a search option to flip to chronological. But, looking at that URL that ends in
sort=date-posted-descI just swappedascfordescand got a link that works to list them all in order taken.Alas I then still had to manually count to find the 106th 106 photo. You, my musical friend will appreciate the irony, because that photo is of a 106 in a door reflecting the town of Tucumcari New Mexico. I stopped there on a cross country road trip specifically because of a Little Feat song and yes I have been to Tucson, Tucumcari, Tehachapi, and Tonapah!