Desire

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. 
― Robert Frost

Is it? I feel like that's pretty self-serving definition of love. Albeit very human... But I definitely agree that the loop of irresistible desire is a part of love and it seems to suit the picture I chose with it's more active pose. 

This is the last of the pink panty series. I took a few more good pictures that afternoon but I find that I weary of the visuals (the pink, the lace, that blanket...) so I don't want to post them.  When I first started this project, I would take a bunch of pictures in one setting but only post one of them. Two at most. I didn't want to see a whole series of pictures on my IG feed that featured the same pair of panties or the same background. I wanted variety and I wanted to push myself to create a body of photographic work that didn't look like the same picture over and over again.

But in the past month, I've decided to use as many pictures as I actually liked; or, as in this case, as many pictures as I could tolerate working with until I wearied of looking at them. There were several good ones in this series but once I settled on an ink color for the text, I had a hard time choosing a different color. So now they're all a set and look borderline identical. And I have mixed feelings about that.

There's something that bugs me about photographers who have a very defined "look" to their shots. Like their whole body of work is a series of minor variations on a theme. It's usually not so much their perspective as their filters and color palettes. When I scroll thru instagram accounts and in thumbnails I can't distinguish one picture from the next, I find that boring even though I know that most photographers get to the point of commercial viability by having a specific point of view and an easily recognizable style. Perhaps this is a digital perspective conclusion and I arrived at this point by using Instagram more and more and seeing 10 pictures at a time on my phone screen? Seeing so many bits of color in  a small confined area creates a blur rather than the sharp edged individuality of a single picture. 

But I can also see how photographers get to the place of a rigid unwavering style because once I've trained my eye to a particular viewpoint or range of color options (in ink color specifically), it's hard to see anything else. And I have the same problem with poses and backgrounds. 

It's funny that these are my concerns now. When I first started this project I would never have guessed it to end up here. I look back over the beginning shots and even the later pictures before I started writing on them and I find them all visually static and uninteresting. It makes me wonder if this project will progress even further and at some point I'll look back on this phase and find it also unfinished and "young," so to speak.  Probably, right?