October 31st

Emily and I have decided it would be fun to take daily pictures of our lives and post them on both our blogs.We will be swapping photos about twice a week (due to the long time difference and unpredictable lines of communication between Armenia and America) and posting them with some short words about what was/is significant about the picture. We're going to keep this up for the month of November.

Me: This is my sister, taken at night at my Grandmother's house. We used to share a bed when we were little and always at least a room after sharing a bed. We are night and day in personality, but when we are both together like this, alone, we end up talking until the both of us eventually don't have to say anything about being too tired and then we turn over and fall asleep. It's also about the moment that we get before we turn off the lights, the half hour or so that magazines and books soothe us into a slumber and we think about all that is possible


Emily: The first snow of the year on the mountains above Yeghegnadzor.

wednesday night

I took this picture this past Spring in Armenia, and now that the weather is beginning to turn and the winds are picking up I start to think about how cold I was there and how many nights I spent in my clothes and how many mornings I huddled around my gas oven staring at the wall hoping for the clouds to break. I always liked this picture, but I never got around to using it. It's incredibly weird how distant my past existence there seems now. Anyway my friend Emily (who is still in Armenia) and I have a project we are going to announce in a week, it will be pretty cool so I hope you come back to see. Till then.....drink good coffee and smile more often.

seeing

I came across this quote from a photographer's blog site that I like, Matt Eich. His blog is much much cooler than mine and he gushes his soul in it as well as puts up beautiful photos. I have been busy, and while I know I want to get out and take pictures I just haven't lately. It's not to this blog that I feel loyalty, but to myself - I just choose to say that here and maybe that's a contradiction but I hope to do something about this soon. Anyways, read this because it's
Great. And if you feel like it, you can go to Matt's blog too.

“At first, it appears that nothing could be easier than seeing. We just point our eyes where we want to go, and gather in whatever there is to see. Nothing could be less in need of explanation. The world is flooded with light, and everything is available to be seen. We can see people, pictures, landscapes, and whatever else we need to see, and with the help of science we can see galaxies, viruses, and the insides of our own bodies. Seeing does not interfere with the world or take anything from it, and it does not hurt or damage anything. Seeing is detached and efficient and rational. Unlike the stomach or the heart, eyes are our own to command: they obey every desire and thought.

Each one of those ideas is completely wrong. The truth is more difficult: seeing is irrational, inconsistent, and undependable. It is immensely troubled, cousin to blindness and sexuality, and caught up in the threads of the unconscious. Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where we have sent them. No matter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at. If we imagine the eyes as navigational devices, we do so in order not to come to terms with what seeing really is. Seeing is like hunting and like dreaming, and even like falling in love. It is entangled in passions–jealousy, violence, possessiveness; and it is soaked in an affect–in pleasure and displeasure, and in pain. Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis not mechanism.” - James Elkins, The Object Stares Back