Randomness Again

Actually randomness never goes away. I started photographing randomness in the oilfields around Burkburnett when I was in high school. It is still a very important part of most of my photography. I see randomness as the unplanned, spontaneous design that I find wherever I go. Many times that is what I start out to find rather than accidently discover, sometimes not.

Alcy is working on her Portfolio Review. She finally decided to do “Marks.” The term comes from her interest in calligraphy and I am not entirely clear on exactly what it means. I first thought it meant the design or style of the character but it seems to be more than that—bordering on the abstract. I thought that to be seen as a mark required that the subject matter be either a number or an alphabetical character. Not so. Any flowing, stylized shape apparently can be a mark. Anyway yesterday we drove over to the Heights to look for marks. On the way we stopped at an abandoned shopping center and later extended the search to Washington Avenue.

I’m going to break yesterdays shoot into three posts because it included three entirely different approaches. One I posted last night, the shots of the abandoned shopping center and other less abstract shots although they generally fall into the found object area. This one which is about randomness and a third addressing photographing art, or in this case graffiti.
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These are, in my estimation, found objects. They are about line, shape, color, balance, imbalance—simply assembling images out of what I see as chaos—finding order in chaos, which is basically what I see the purpose of randomness to be.

 

The underlying theme of many of my randomness shots also includes time, or the passage of time represented in the overlayering, the weathering, the fading, the disfiguring, the running or peeling paint included within the frames. Time has always been an important part of the randomness photographs.

Unintention is an important part of randomness, probably the most important part of randomness. True, the gang graffiti was at one time applied with intention, maybe not terribly well controlled intention—what has happened in the interim is the unintended, the part of randomness that is uncontrolled by consciousness--which is an important concept to the randomness photographs. That concept of being outside of control, to me is important, the part that is unintended. It is like a happening from the Seventies, which I guess is still a part of me, so maybe nostalgia is also a part of randomness—the desire for a freer, less restricted, less controlled existence and at the same time finding order in that freedom. Even though, my photographs of randomness began long before the Seventies so maybe the nostalgia goes back beyond happenings to the Fifties, a much more structured time for most although not so much for me--I'm not entirely sure I even grasp the concept of control. Which may account for my fasination with randomness, for finding order in chaos.