L' oeil ailleurs

INTRODUCING DEREK VINCENT
I am from a more rural area of the state of Connecticut in the United States. It was great to live there because there was so much nature and natural beauty to explore. I currently live in Boston. It feels a little less inspiring at the moment than I’d like it to be. I turned 24 years old last month. I started taking pictures almost six years ago. I took my father’s 35mm SLR back to school with me my freshman year of college to take long exposure night photographs in the city. I really wanted to take normal scenes and make them look strangely different. I had zero knowledge of photography. With photography, I often want to cause myself and people around me to remember moments differently. This comes my initial attempts photography and the other things I did with the medium as I progressed over six years to where I am now, hopefully with a lot less of the cheesiness of cross-processing or multiple exposures that I had played around with at the start. With my 35mm point-and-shoot photographs, I try to catch everyday moments of my life and make them more surreal. Instead of a faint memory, I have some frame that emboldens a moment and alters the life it had. Since I started taking pictures I’ve realized that I have become an observer, often stepping away from an action or scene to watch and wait for the opportunity to catch something with my camera. There is a certain power to this, without the majority of my photographs, my memories would be faded and obscured. However, the lens allows me to create unreal scenes that imply many actions, and and far from what really happened. Without photography, I would have had to find another creative outlet because this takes up so much of my idle mind. Also without the memories the photographs provide, the last years of my life would seem pretty boring. I hope that I can do something more with it, that it’s not something I only do in my free time. This is a photo of a fire I started. Back in 2007, I worked as a forester and firefighter through a conservation agency known as the SCA for six months. I worked on the Yakama Indian Reservation in Washington state. We were burning brush piles out in the forest that were cut to eliminate fuel for wildfires the next year. I was using a drip-torch, a can filled with a diesel/gas mixture with a flame at the end of a curly-cue spout. You tilt it over and gas dribbles out the end, gets ignited by the flame and falls to the ground. A photographer that I really like is my friend John Wilson. He is my neighbor and a filmmaker. He has little internet presence for his photography, as he is mostly interested in film. The photographs he does make do make me jealous. More specifically, there is a good grouping interspersed with short videos here.

I am from a more rural area of the state of Connecticut in the United States. It was great to live there because there was so much nature and natural beauty to explore. I currently live in Boston. It feels a little less inspiring at the moment than I’d like it to be. I turned 24 years old last month. I started taking pictures almost six years ago. I took my father’s 35mm SLR back to school with me my freshman year of college to take long exposure night photographs in the city. I really wanted to take normal scenes and make them look strangely different. I had zero knowledge of photography. With photography, I often want to cause myself and people around me to remember moments differently. This comes my initial attempts photography and the other things I did with the medium as I progressed over six years to where I am now, hopefully with a lot less of the cheesiness of cross-processing or multiple exposures that I had played around with at the start. With my 35mm point-and-shoot photographs, I try to catch everyday moments of my life and make them more surreal. Instead of a faint memory, I have some frame that emboldens a moment and alters the life it had. Since I started taking pictures I’ve realized that I have become an observer, often stepping away from an action or scene to watch and wait for the opportunity to catch something with my camera. There is a certain power to this, without the majority of my photographs, my memories would be faded and obscured. However, the lens allows me to create unreal scenes that imply many actions, and and far from what really happened. Without photography, I would have had to find another creative outlet because this takes up so much of my idle mind. Also without the memories the photographs provide, the last years of my life would seem pretty boring. I hope that I can do something more with it, that it’s not something I only do in my free time. This is a photo of a fire I started. Back in 2007, I worked as a forester and firefighter through a conservation agency known as the SCA for six months. I worked on the Yakama Indian Reservation in Washington state. We were burning brush piles out in the forest that were cut to eliminate fuel for wildfires the next year. I was using a drip-torch, a can filled with a diesel/gas mixture with a flame at the end of a curly-cue spout. You tilt it over and gas dribbles out the end, gets ignited by the flame and falls to the ground. A photographer that I really like is my friend John Wilson. He is my neighbor and a filmmaker. He has little internet presence for his photography, as he is mostly interested in film. The photographs he does make do make me jealous. More specifically, there is a good grouping interspersed with short videos here.

2:49 pm • 21 November 2009 • 4 notes