reflections on pictures

I've been gone for two weeks and return in two weeks and feel comfortable being the bookmark between my coming and going. I brought paper to work on drawings but have felt much more comfortable spending my time looking through a camera than sitting with a pen in my hand. It's a different sort of thought process and I like how documenting with a camera helps me experience and retain things in the same moment. This is not to say I don't love drawing dearly, but it does feel inappropriate to spend my time being sedentary and reflective right now-- I'll be back in my studio in San Francisco soon enough! It feels a little irresponsible and reckless to be taking pictures... and I like it.

Come next semester and I'll be working with photographer Larry Sultan in one of my classes and am excited to dialogue with him and the other photographers in that class about some of my photo-based drawings. What is the difference between a photograph and a drawing? How can one establish when one or the other is the most appropriate format for an image? My friend Adrienne is busy curating a show and asked that I consider submitting my drawings instead of my photographs because she has been swamped by photography submissions. I'm excited to be doing something that looks different from other people's work, but am sometimes unclear on why I'm doing what I'm doing the way I'm doing it, and continue to be baffled by why some ideas turn out to be so verbose and successful while other ones suffocate and fail.