One Night in Brooklyn ~ Travelog Thursday

Many times I find lyrics in music that click with moments in my life, like anyone. Sometimes randomly, sometimes with precise detail to my life. But there is a lyric that I connected with that made me think back on my past year and change. The line is from hip-hop artist Mos Def:

"sometimes I sit back and just reflect,

Watch the world go by and my thoughts connect, 

I think about the time past and the time to come..."

Back in September I was in New York on my journey down from New Hampshire to Baltimore. I spent about a month going from one friend's bed to another friend's futon throughout Hoboken, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Baltimore, etc. The night before my birthday I traveled out to Brooklyn to do a photo shoot of the three musical members of NYC indie band, Ghost Ghost! 

Karl, Kevin, and Tim had asked me to take some photos of them to promote their gig they were playing at the CMJ Music Marathon in October. The idea was to actually make the photographs capture them "training for the marathon" as the humor was that the marathon was actually of auditory nature and nothing to do with physical endurance. Once that idea clicked, then the idea of adding 80's style attire and attitude was too perfect to ignore.

Emotion is the masterpiece of an artist's tools

This weekend the idea of extracting emotion from someone with writing or a photograph came into my head many times. Whether it was a photograph that I gifted someone and combined it with my writing or reading reports on the terrible wreckage of the tsunami in Japan and seeing the devastation it caused, the ability to make an effect on someone’s emotions is a powerful thing.

My goal as a writer and photographer (or “artist” if you consider it that) has always been to create an emotion out of my audience. Whether it is a smile, a surprise, a frown, or a tear, I take every emotion as a specific critique just as if a chef served their first dish of the evening and watched the customer’s reaction to the dish. Is it too spicy? Too sweet? Not enough flavor or a little more? All of these questions are how I improve my craft as anyone in a similar field would. And as they say, only a writer improves by reading other writers’ work and this also applies for artists. The more work you see, the more creative you can expand (or restrict) your work.