Yeah, so I was working at MEC today, and I managed to sneak out an hour early because it wasn’t so busy, and I had a lot of things I wanted to get started at home. HOWEVERS. After seeing I had a missed call I found out Wee had called because he was drying out the fullpipe at Bonsor.
BASICALLY, skateboarders rule. Some of us just want to skate pretty much all the time, including dudes who’ve been skating since the first days of Seylynn like Wee, and some of us will go out for even just half an hour solo mission in minus seven degree weather.
I only stayed for half an hour because of….man bruises..and I was pushing myself too much. If I was at full health I probably would have stayed longer. Though, I was by myself, and it was damn cold. The video above is probably not the best line I got a little video from, the first video I shot was def the best skating, but you can’t see anything at all, not that you can in this one really either, but the later ones where I moved the camera, I skated even worse, hah. Anyways.
So on remembrance day Brendon, Jason, Yvonne and I went on a little roadtrip to Hope, British Columbia. This day was pretty epic for me. Not only a whole day of driving with three awesome friends, but I shot three rolls of film, and made 27 prints from one day. In the process of making these prints I had a lot of really good thoughts about the creation of memories in photographs.
I entered these five photographs into a student photo contest, though I’m not sure the email got through in time. We’ll see what happens.
I also wrote this as my “Artists Statement”:
Dylan Davies is a photographer who works solely with traditional analog processes. He photographs primarily skateboarding, and aspects of skateboarding culture. His work though, like skateboarding, is influenced by his life, and is an attempt to create and explore the ideas of memories. Whether he functions literally in his work, or more abstractly, dealing with memory is an attempt to understand the significance of photographing during the shift into a digital era.
The Hope body of work concerns memory in an age where photographs are losing their ability to create meaningful memories. The Age of Digital images makes a visual landscape of photographs our body is not able to understand without the aid of a computer. This work is shot and produced traditionally to make silver-gelatin prints which serve as a memory for the landscape and our place within it. They are objects which preserve an image we can readily understand without the aid of computer technology.
Oh yeah, I apologize if the tones are a bit warmish/magenta, I didn’t really feel like touching them up in the hurry I was to get the images emailed out.
Also, pretty stoked about a lot of things right now. JUST SO YOU KNOW.
The above photo taken sometime in early September, the same day as this one by Jessie James (whose new site layout is nice to look at). There’s just something really satisfying about having a 4×5 of you. I am hoping I’ll get to print this for myself sometime soon, more or less to remind me about skateboarding everyday that I don’t get to skate.
How am I supposed to tell my friends that they need to have more confidence in their work, when 1: I generally lack confidence in my own work 2:We go to a school which appeals to a certain established aesthetic within Vancouver
3: we go to a school which is currently trying to downplay the photo department, in an effort to “Green” the school, and we straight up do not get as many opportunities as other students
How are any of us supposed to accomplish anything when it’s so hard to believe in what you’re doing? Some of us aren’t just being students, we’re genuinely loving to make the photographs we make. And everything around us is telling us that we can’t afford/have no reason to make the images that we make. I’m really frustrated with my school right now. And I still just want to make the photographs I’m making. I don’t know what to do, I’d really like to give the friends I have confidence, and keep seeing them make amazing things. But I feel like I can only do so much, and then it’s completely out of my hands. And I feel like such a weiner, because I totally don’t have enough confidence in my own work either. I’ve been thinking that if I could I would just be a printing technician for the rest of my life, because I really just love printing and looking at real(reads: analog) photographs. The rest of the time I wish I could just be skateboarding all the time.
I’m really late, and this is a really bad rant.. so here’s another photograph that my friends made. Brendon Hartley is also partially responsible for this one, though he and Jason Edwards were passing the camera back and fourth (the camera being a really interesting Cambo/Polaroid large format camera, that takes four images on a single sheet of 4×5 film), and neither are really sure who shot what. It’s from sometime last Spring, probably just when the weather started to get nice, and when school started to wind down.
