flickr set me straigt

I went to a prep school. It wasn't my choice. I guess it's never really anyone's choice. I was fresh off the boat, an anarchist at heart but unsure if that meant the same as socialist or the opposite. I was wearing flannel well into the mid 90s, and I tried to be bad, I really did, but didn't know any insults in English (until you can swear competently in a language you shouldn't do it; things like "it went to shits", "I f*** you" and "I am pissing for you" will result and people will think you are cute and your mission of insulting and being bad will fail). Tried dying my hair all kinds of crazy colors, but I like my hair and the craziest I dared was red and it turned out orange and apparently they figured that was close enough to the required 'natural color' and let me be. Because I couldn't really talk much at all, I was nice and polite and even with a lot of effort did not manage to break the dress code. I wanted to but I didn't like short dresses because those were not deep, dark and secretive at all and nobody seemed to care about the flannel, which retrospectively I consider cruel and wish that someone would have done something about that. Thanks facebook for making sure I can never forget (note: please help your foreign exchange student and don't let this happen to anyone else). So yes, I did graduate and now I can speak of the horrors of private education in the USA.

One day the rough path that life had set out for me gave way to a brief interlude of freedom. Or so I though. Possibly to justify the school fees or possibly because the school was not entirely designed to be a conspiracy against the young and anarchistic minded, whatever the reason, we had a darkroom and the luxury of taking photo classes to help us broaden our horizons (and get into the right colleges). Under normal circumstances I might have missed the announcement of photo classes due to energy spent engaged in loathing of the people who had done this to me, but my fortune was good. Maybe to show this foreign exchange student that there was life outside of flannel, a nice boy took me to the photo lab to help me beat out of the way the hoards of art-expression thirsty students and got my me on the list for the class. I am sorry I forgot your name. It's all a bit of a blurr. The first day I showed up with my snapshot camera only to be introduced to this really complicated machine, which appeared even then to set us back ages in terms of technology: an old fashioned SLR camera. This is obviously way pre-digital. German girl needed a dictionary first to translate the explanation of aperture and f-stop and generally got the feeling that once again they were going to undermine any creative musings. I got that feeling when the first lesson was on not touching your face before touching the film or photo paper because apparently your face is greasier than anything in that whole darkroom. Really? The second lesson was on what not to take pictures of.

Cutting to the chase: No puppies, babies, kitties, ponies and also no nudity (see above paragraph on the repressive culture of the school). Funny; that rule really stuck with me.

The very first thing I did in college was a project on nudity (incidentally my photo teacher, apparently not entirely deranged, had predicted that this would happen to all of us) but for years I stayed away from puppies, kitties, ponies. I took many crooked and definitely dark, deep and secretive shots of the homeless, the drunk, the funny looking, the badly dressed, badly shaped and generally down and out. Really getting that 'angle' into their lives seemed to be the answer. If you are in one of my early pictures, be very concerned. A bit later, poverty in general seemed like a good place to find inspiration: not cute, not fluffy. So instead of offering a hand or dollar or something for crying out loud to the old nice ragged man in an unnamed Andean country carrying a bundle on his head that was larger than my dorm room, I held my camera into his face (at this point outfitted with a zoom lens that rivaled even his load) and the charmingly rustic hut he calls his home. Following that, I did so many self-portraits that I can trace the exact pattern in which each freckle of mine evolved over the course of a given summer and can now use this for future predictions; I did self portraits in bath tubs, on beaches, in pools, on couches, tried the swing set but failed and I was totally into disconnected, random shapes (ideally dark and with a bit of poverty oozing out of them), eventually took the plunge and photographed kids, but not babies, and only if not cute and this is starting to annoy me, but yes, poor and maybe even a bit dirty, after that tried landscapes and even today I can really do a great reflection on a serene lake or that autumn alley, leafs on the sides of it, leading into seemingly unending forests, but all this time I followed the golden rule: no puppies, no kitties, no ponies and I sure love ponies, and kitties and puppies for that matter are growing on me too but taking pictures of them is cheating. Cheating was a big one in that school code. Unlike in that European country where I received my primary education, you just don't cheat in school. Don't. Really. Believe me.

Lets fast forward a few years. It's 2007, memory cards have taken the place of film, you can set your ISO to 3200 with a simple flick of a button, you never have to spend frantic afternoons trying to roll your film onto those horrendous wheels when developing it; and somehow it seems that everyone, prep school or not, got into photography, real photography, at some point. I have been told that Kiosk ladies in Russia, business men in Japan and everyone in between ('between what' I guess is the question? I simply mean everyone, everywhere) when probed will list their most creative hobby as photography. Where better to watch the democratization of this art form than on one of the many picture posting forums? The great realization I came to thanks to flickr is that life is nothing like prep school. I also realized that people LOVE babies, ponies, kitties and doggies and they are not at all shy about it, as a matter of fact they act like it's not even cheating to have an entire career in photographing only the aforementioned subjects. I have to admit I did once, not that long ago, post a picture of one kitty and one puppy (I promise, only one and it was only to show off the pretty beach and the rucksacking through Turkey activity on our part, which obviously is perfectly legit to photograph) and guess what? They are my top scorers (right after that picture I tagged 'nude models' and 'school girls').