by Nick Turpin via My Modern Met

by Daniel Gil via unusualyoung

via unusualyoung

by Angeles Peña via soundthat

by Valerie Finnis via unusualyoung

by Fox Harvard

by Kirill Vorontsov via My Modern Met

by unic0rn-aliiv3 via soundthat

by Creative Rehab

by Michelle Karpman via My Modern Met

Do go check out these photographers, visit the blogs, bookmark and return to them, support the arts, create your own.  More to come.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

~ Franz Kafka

I always gained something from making myself better,
better than I am, better than I was,
that most subtle citation:
to recover some lost petal
of the sadness I inherited:
to search once more for the light that sings
inside of me, the unwavering light.

~ Pablo Neruda

"Touching Each Other’s Surfaces"

Skin meeting skin, we want to think
we know each other scientifically;
we want to believe
it is objective knowledge
gives this conviction of intimacy,
makes us say it feels so right.
That mole below your shoulder blade,
the soft hair over my thighs—
we examine our bodies with the precision
known only to lovers or surgeons,
all those whose profession is explication,
who have to believe their own words.
And yet, having memorized each turning,
each place where bone strains or bends,
each hollow, each hair, each failure of form,
we still encounter that stubborn wall,
that barrier which hides an infinite vastness
the most sincere gesture can’t find.

Nor does emotion take us further
than the shared heat of our bodies
aware of themselves,
the flattery of multiple desires.
We rest in each other’s arms unexplained
by these currents of feeling rushing past
like ripples over a pool of water
whose substance never changes,
reflecting each wave, each ribboned crossing,
without being really moved.
We search each other’s eyes so long
beyond our own reflections,
finding only the black centers,
the immeasurable interior we’ll
never reach with candle,
never plumb with love.

Perhaps it is just this ignorance,
this absence of certainty, lack of clear view,
more than anything, brings us together,
draws us into and through each other
to the unknown inside us all,
that gray space from which
what we know of ourselves
emerges briefly, casts a transient
shadow across the earth
and learns to believe in itself just enough
to believe in some one else.

~ Carol Jane Bangs

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

~ Charles Bukowski

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

~ Ansel Adams

"Mean Love Poem"

Glasses off,
you are beautiful.
My glasses.

~ Bob Hicok

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.

~ Anaïs Nin

"Do You Have The Poem?"

Do you have your river poem?
Do you have your ditch poem?
Do you have the one
with the trenches?
Do you have the poem
about the puddles,
the one about the waters,
the one that flows
back and forth to find
its own level?
Do you have the one
that tells about the deep hole,
the poem about
the hollowed out well?
Do you have the poem
about the mass graves
and the dirt pushed aside?
Do you have your ocean poem?
Do you have the one
that leaves me drenched?
Do you have the poem
that fills my lungs with fluid,
the one that I dive into?
Do you have the poem
that I fall into?
Do you have the poem
that buries me?
Do you have my death poem?

~ Christopher Parks

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes

~ Gustave Flaubert

I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: the world of art is the only such realm. I entered it without any apparent talent, a thorough novice, incapable, awkward, tongue-tied, almost paralyzed by fear and apprehensiveness. I had to lay one brick on another, set millions of words to paper before writing one real, authentic word dragged up from my own guts. The facility of speech which I possessed was a handicap; I had all the vices of the educated man. I had to learn to think, feel and see in a totally new fashion, in an uneducated way, in my own way, which is the hardest thing in the world. I had to throw myself into the current, knowing that I would probably sink. The great majority of artists are throwing themselves in with life-preservers around their necks, and more often than not it is the life-preserver which sinks them.

~ Henry Miller

by ianbroyles via photons

by Robert Fougere via istillshootfilm

by bloodyjohn via soundthat

by shootinglovelypeople via soundthat

by Fernando Ocaña Fernández via soundthat

by Petit Ming via soundthat

by svenwerk via Digital Photography School

by Jeff Brouws via unusualyoung

by Matt Power via soundthat

by Giles McGarry via soundthat

Go check out more work by these artists, as well as these curators’ collections.  More spring cleaning to come.

Do I want to write on my iPad now that I have an iPad. Will my words flow faster or slower typing or writing – electronic or ink to paper. Will it be as tactile and as satisfying as amassing shelves of black spiral-bound notebooks. Should I go to Barnes & Noble and get a new 5 dollar Moleskine. Does that make me a writer. Does that recapture the writer that was.

Photos. Do I re-set-up the darkroom in the basement. Do I locate and fix the light leak in my old repurposed pinhole Conley. Do I need new camera strap so I don’t feel like a total douche with my Nikon-branded strap… so I don’t feel weighted down by bulky speed straps. So I can wear my camera all the time. Do I need a macro lens. Do I need to save up for the new D4. A Leica M9.

How do I create.

That clearly is not the question. This is a question?

So much mental energy is spent on the how of creation – and I never ever make it to: what should I create, when should I create. Clearly the answers are whatever automatically comes without forethought and planning and whenever I amass enough shit to get it right. Is that what makes an artist? Shit?

The artistry comes from constancy, consistency, practice, write crap photograph crap learn craft repeat repeat. A baby stage I never make it to because consumerism leaked in somewhere just like no matter how much time I spent on spinning that needle through the aluminum coke can panel and blacking out and taping up and sealing off the light leaks into that old wooden camera and diminishes each work it produces.

And maybe I was never a writer or a photographer. I never attended workshops or enrolled in MFA programs. I read and ape. Maybe it isn’t enough. But even if it never was enough, if all I ever did was journal and click and tinker and spew, it was satisfying. Where is that now. When does the cycle break. When does the creation begin again. When does it start to be important again. Was it ever important.

These aren’t questions. There are no answers except one – no progress is made if nothing is ever begun.

This is unfiltered. And this is just for me.