A FREESTOCK IMAGE in the Creative
Commons Attribution pool. Click on the image to go to the original
Flickr page and then “All Sizes” to get the high res version.
Please credit: Justus Hayes / Shoes on Wires / http://shoesonwires.com
Fear, excitement, exhilaration, anxiety, exaltation, paranoia, dread, joy, and a lot more.
I have to revisit this, so hard to explain but so potent, so rich and so real. Imagine that there are two of you in this place, this dank, dark, spooky, creepy, disturbed place. One of you is happy to have made it, to have succeeded, to be there with camera and time and the ability to accomplish your immediate short-term goals - taking photos of this place. You want to shout and laugh and jump and sing - “I’m here! I’m here! I made it! I’m in!!!!!” But of course, look where you are. This is a bad place, after all. A place of pain and fear and despair. A place where madness and insanity have stretched the boundary thin, have scratched away with bleeding fingernails the interface between the real and the unreal. There is bad mojo here, no bullshit about that, seriously bad energy. And so you rock back and forth on that unlikely fulcrum, back and forth, joy and terror, elation and despair, satisfaction and dread. Your heart hammering, the hairs on your neck and arms raising, you calmly set up the tripod and take the photos. You smoke a cigarette and make sure the smoke doesn’t get in the shot, maybe you take a nip out of the flask in your coat, you relax and panic at the same time. Such a strange state of mind, both on and off, up and down, completely paradoxical. You take the photos - that’s why you’re here. Right?
