The untaken picture
Hello everyone, since there are many new names since the last time it's time for a little introduction...thanks everyone for any interest.
I am Gabriele Lopez and this is one of the few yearly newsletter I use to keep in touch with friends around. I hope this is something you love, if it’s so just enjoy and maybe send it to someone that could be interested, otherwise you can easily unsubscribe at the bottom of the page.
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The untaken photographs
It's almost winter time now, so it's normally time to make some kind of balance for me, usually.
For the first time in the recent years it's even time for slowdown and make my stuffs, compared to what has happened in the last years, where it's been mostly a rat-race like many business are...but the truth is that I'm not a businessman at all, the point is that I don't care. It all started and evolved for different ideas than business.
I stopped accepting new assignments that are not absolutely necessary in the last month, and plan to continue all winter in the same way, except meeting people in my Red Room Darkroom, the only thing I will work on in the close future.
That immediately gave me back the pleasure of looking back at my archive and focus on what matters to me. That happens by a lot of darkroom print since I love that way, but the next body of work could be a wave of digital color works I finally had the time to look over after years of waiting room.
I made my final personal website version visible, making it vanish the old one, again.
Making it was an exercise in awareness and understanding.
During the years there have been so many changes and "periods" and interests in life and photography.
Being trapped as a factory worker before I was even 20 years old I discovered photography by chance and was lucky enough to be interested in it.
The Subway years were a shock to me and gave me the surprise that changed everything but then trends came in...and this is the point.
I call them the "street photography years" where I could not wait to have some free time from my regular job to wander the street and make picture that could make me happy and exchanged on Flickr, or whatever. At a certain point it came natural, it felt good, and for sure gave me a lot back...feeling the rhythm, the loneliness and every kind of desire, and expressing it by a camera...
I'm not saying I'm regretting it or calling it useless but...looking at my archive now and going to the experience I had in my life, there's something missing now, when half a century of life is just a little step away.
All those years of Italian factory, were crazy, believe me: Heidelberg offset printers were hard to run and so many crazy stuffs happened in those long days and nights. Colleagues and bosses were characters that could jump out from a book I read daily now, a kind of reality that is totally disappeared now.
I wonder why I didn't do any of those portraits or taken some scenes from those days if not just a few?
Why I have not taken pictures of a guy that showed up at the night shift taking a sheep with him that welcomed the boss at early morning in the courtyard?
Pallet trucks races in the night and people that was totally troubled and always out of time and place was given for granted, I wasn't ready, I am probably not, still.
I have something, but is 1% of what was going daily.
What about my daughter? I have so many slides and snapshots that I love of course but why I did not understood that all the efforts in street photography (or whatever) had the right subject just ready every time?
I had a Contax T2 camera loaded with tri-x when this combination was cheap like you could not believe now, and I was just leaving it stand for the next "street photography occasion" or whatever else "photography trick"
I think you got the point already, and mine is that I did almost anything in the wrong moment. I became a father young and that made me hungry for "the next thing" not allowing me to enjoy the moment...
My tip to who ever asks me about this is simple: focus on what is really important for you, on what gives the real sense to your life and experience and could disappear. It's not strangers on the street that you'll miss having taken photographs of. This (to me) closed every door to any possible "workshop".
Life is a workshop already.
All this takes my mind and desire close to the same old question: "do I still want to shoot commercial photography?" Or, in better words: "Do I still desire to market my photography behind a certain point ?"
This year's photography money income were great, one of the best years, but i feel burned out, and uninterested.
Didn't I wasted time enough? Wouldn't it be nice to go back and enjoy the present?
Focus on what's REALLY valid for you.
...Feel free to get in touch or hear you in spring/summer...
Gabriele
“You just have to live and life will give you pictures.”
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“Yes fills time. No makes time.” — Sean McCabe
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"The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.” — Charlie Munger
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“The reason most of us are unhappy most of the time is that we set our goals – not for the person we’re going to be when we reach them – we set our goal for the person we are when we set them.” — Dan Gilbert