Do you know what your problem is? Isn't that a great way to start a message? I think I'll begin all of my conversations that way from now on. Anyway, do you know what your problem is? About the photographs, I mean. You are like a chef who goes to a Fourth of July picnic where everybody just wants hot dogs and hamburgers and beer and bags of potato chips, and you insist on cooking frog's legs. And everyone's going "Yuck! What's this?" You think they should try frog's legs and learn to appreciate it, but they know what they want, and it ain't frog's legs. They want comfort food, not gourmet. They just want you to humbly provide a service and to give them what they are looking for-- an image of themselves that conforms to what they would like to see. If you're not willing to do that for them, I don't think you should be mad that they're not appreciating your efforts. Though it does seem to me that it's possible to have everybody posed the way they think is comfortable, and still end up with a sensitive, interesting photograph that reveals more about the people than they thought it would. Isn't that the way a lot of top notch portrait photographers operate -- somehow let the people feel really comfortable, and being themselves, while still in some sense posing for the camera, and sometimes a beautiful, surprising essence of that person shines through. Anyway, I can see both sides, why they're not accepting what you have to offer, and why you're not happy about it. They know what they want, and you know what you want, and they're not the same thing. The only solutions are (a) you give them what they want or (b) be done with family photography, as you already suggested. Option b is too bad, though, since you've got all those photography skills.
Thanks for the nice words about my woodcut. I attached a picture of another one. This one is obviously based on Moby Dick, but it's essentially about madness. Each of the people on the boat was a particular person from the rooming house where I lived during college, where about half the people were certifiably insane. Two of the people I pictured are dead, one by suicide, another by the mysterious death circumstances that often happens to schizophrenics. I'm the guy cowering and covering his head in his hands.
I don't know which type of fertilizer Timothy McVey used in his Oklahoma bomb, but I do know it's hard to buy certain kinds of nitrate or nitrogen fertilizer now. Last year the guy as the garden supply center told me I should buy some "urea" which is nitrogen fertilizer made out of cow urine. I said fine. He said he didn't have any, I should come back next week. I came back the next week and he didn't have any. Come back next week. And so on for a few more weeks, until he finally told me that he didn't think it would ever come in, because government regulations made it almost impossible for him to get the stuff, thanks to its usefulness in bomb making. I ended up buying a sack of dried cow's blood, which also has lots of nitrogen, but doesn't make very good bombs, I guess. So I was flinging handfuls of dried cow blood all over the vegetable garden. My dog came up, and I thought he would be interested in the smell of dried cow blood. I put my hands out and he sniffed them. He got a very worried look on his face, then ran away.
--edward
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