SHRED OR DEAD

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.