I’m going through some old photographs from a road trip across the American West two years ago, as part of this large project I’ve given myself to fully update my PhotoShelter Archives. Which is rough, by the way. Even nostalgia can’t make thousands of old (bad) photographs interesting. And nostalgia is a powerful tool. I still like a lot of the images I took back then, but with a kind of qualifier that I’m a different kind of photographer these days. Not better or worse, just different. Maybe it’s circumstantial. Or maybe it’s just growing up, out or wherever.
In other news, homeless, drug-addled art darling Dash Snow apparently died of an overdose today. Or maybe it was yesterday. I could never separate him from the dangerous celebrity mythos that surrounded him, and though his art sometimes hit some marks a bit sideways, it always seemed to me more like his fame came from his grandmother’s maiden name and the lifestyle he had subsequently chosen for himself. He had a book with a funny title. He would masturbate on things and then sprinkle glitter across them. He put colorful little rainbows coming out of Kennedy’s shot-open head. He took Polaroids of drug addicts and other low-brow scenes that most high-brow art people would/could never see on their own. And then he died of a drug overdose at the magical age of 27. If you are interested in Dash Snow, this New York Magazine article is a nice, long, in-depth read.
