I returned to JPG Magazine (jpgmag.com) a few days ago to share some of the photos I’ve been taking lately.
That’s what an attention whore does, you know. Put stuff out there and hope people will say nice things about it.
The feedback has been pretty good, but I’ve noticed something.
A lot of the contributions remind me of stuff I shot in my 20s when I had a camera and lenses but no idea what to point them at. I must have shot a million frames of crap – fortunately I was buying my black and white film in bulk and processing it myself.
An awful lot of the contributions to JPG Magazine online are themes I thought were cool when I was in my 20s and didn’t know shit about life. Stuff like:
- Flowers
- Abandoned buildings
- Young people looking pensive and pretending to have profound thoughts
- Abandoned cars
- Cemeteries, especially statuary
- Alleys in cities
- Bare trees
- Still lifes
- Detail shots of cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc.
- Public restrooms
- People with tattoos and/or piercings
- Grizzled looking old people
- Homeless people
- Rusty objects or things in decay (youth has a fascination with decay and death)
With a few happy exceptions, I don’t think I started taking decent pictures until the late 1990s when I bought a Nikon N90S to keep up with Maria, who had also become a Nikon shooter. Maybe I’m still not taking good pictures, but I’m having a lot of fun. Much of the time, it feels like magic happens when I start shooting and the addition of HDR has added a whole new dimension of creative possibilities.
Most of the photos I like are of people and animals doing things. I don’t know why. They just appeal to me as moments frozen in time. I don’t pretend they’re art.
You can find my stuff at jpgmag.com under johnmflora.
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