Demotion/Promotion

I don’t know that I need to address my absence. On the off-chance, dear reader, that you’ve been wondering what’s happened to me or felt concerned for my well-being, I can only thank you for your thoughts.  I’ll use the same canned excuses as others–there was a pandemic, there was coming back from a pandemic, there was sickness and there was heath but in the end there was just an unwillingness to commit to anything other than the barest of essentials just to keep everything together.  


…and by everything I mean family.  The last few years between when I posted last and now have been spent caring for the only thing that truly has any lasting meaning–family.  We’ve had some incredibly difficult times to be honest, dear reader.  We’ve had days where we all cried.  We have days where it took all the energy we had just to get out of bed, or put on clothes or even put one foot in front of the other.  We’ve had days where we just wanted to set the world on fire and watch it burn to the fucking ground.  


That anger was only for us.  It’s not for you to feel or know about, but what’s important to understand is that through that process we bonded together in a way that I always dreamed my family would.  We were bound so tightly to each other that the collective well-being of each and every person in our family was the only thing in focus.  Through that unity, love, strength and determination we weathered our storms together, truly believing that nothing else could matter more.  It wasn’t like we didn’t fight.  It wasn’t all fucking rainbows and unicorns–it’s been brutal and lovely and scary and overpowering and humbling.  But we did it together and through that collective burden we found a closeness that now sits at the center of our family. 


Through that lens, the world looks different.  Lofty goals in life that once were these cornerstones of what one might view as a successful career suddenly felt empty and trite.  The fighting to be seen or to be right felt pompous and backwards.  The concept of live work/balance was placed un a microscope and magnified a million times and cracked under the pressure.  All I could think was so much time wasted.  So much time gone.  So much time I can never get back just trying to make people who didn’t value me or my opinions happy for their 30 seconds of airtime that no one would ultimately remember.  


Not that I haven’t been truly blessed to work with and for some truly lovely people, nor is it to suggest that the time spent working with or for those people was anything less than an absolute blessing.  I’m just saying that that ratio is hopelessly skewed and all that time spent slaving away at all hours of the night and weekends and holidays, away from from the people I love, missing the important moments of their lives and all just to feel that reassuring pat on my head by some person who thinks it’s ok to wait until Friday at 5pm to call in a 3 days worth of changes-that despite the lies I told myself about the sacrifices required to continue the upward trajectory of my career or how this would be the last time I would allow it to happen just to agree to it all again the next week–was hopelessly not worth it.  Not one minute was worth it.  


And as I watch mediocre people, push, kick, scream, lie and cheat for position and status in a sea of their perfectly mediocre competitors speckled with fewer and fewer truly talented and gifted individuals–As I watch these flaccid opportunists climb on top of each other, scampering in desperation towards the top of a festering pile of other creatively impotent opportunists, all willing to say and do whatever they can to further their position on the heap, I know want nothing to do with it.  I’m tired of being scared of what desperate people will do to climb over you if you have something they want.  I’m exhausted worrying about the consequences of the lies that these people can tell and their willingness to do anything–however vile–in their desperate attempt to not be found out for being the simple ordinary untalented people they are.   


When you understand what truly matters to you, walking away from status or position isn’t a demotion.  It’s actually the other way around.  It’s elevation, it’s elation–a true promotion.  I only wish I had figured it out sooner.


Shot on a LeicaM7, Kodak Tri-X pushed +2 at the Icon. 


(Intermission)

I’m finally back in Los Angeles after two months in Stockholm.


And it’s heartbreaking.


From the second I got off the plane and needed to get though passport control, I was smacked in the face with the brutal reality of how utterly run-down our infrastructure is.  The line wound back on itself I don’t know how many times… every masked person itching their noses, wiping their pits with their sweat-stained shirts and fanning themselves with their hands all waiting in a line that seemed infinitely long and complex and sedentary.  Since AM is a green card holder we didn’t get to do the line for residents–we had to wait in the cattle-call queue with everyone from everywhere.  The heat combined with sleep deprivation combusted in a white-flash panic-attack the second my feet stopped moving and my gaze moved down the never-ending contour of shoulder after shoulder blending in the end to a horizon of dark wood, industrial carpet and immigration posters.  The ensuing panic was luckily short-lived thanks to a helpful docent who, upon seeing Elliot moved us into the expedited service line for people with special needs.  Membership in the 47 club sometimes has it’s benefits–thanks bud.  Otherwise I’m sure I’d still be in that fucking line, hair on fire, ranting incoherently, every sixty seconds one minute closer to dying in an attempt to reenter the country that somehow managed to forget what a functioning society requires.


Victory was short-lived as the challenge of transporting five people and two moths-worth of  luggage ten miles from the airport to home swung steadily into view.  There are no cab pickups at LAX arrivals–you shuttle to a separate area of the airport where lines of Uber, Lyft and Taxi’s then shuttle you home which all sounds ok in practice but turned out to be more of a logistical head-scratcher.  The shuttle buses were ill-equipped  to handle the amount of baggage we had, of course, and they were hopelessly over crowded besides being too few and too far in between.  In the end, we walked from the international terminal all the way to the ride-share area–which just happens to be the furthest point from international arrivals as the crow flies.  So cut to five utterly exhausted and overburdened souls trekking for 25 minutes across all the concourses LAX has to offer just to get a cab. When we finally got there, I scanned down the line of cabs waiting… there were a bajillion of them of course, found the first mini-van, opened his trunk and started loading in the myriad duffels, suitcases and backpacks we had hauled all the way from Europa.  The driver got out, looking scared and confused, and said he might get in trouble for picking us up so far back in the line (there were twenty Prius’s in front of him).  He scanned the taxi queue for a second, considered silently for a second more than looked me in the eye and said, 


“Get in!”


So we boarded as he loaded the remaining metric ton of bags into the clown-car-style-cargo-hold of this surprisingly roomy Chevy minivan.  Relief washed over me.  I rolled down my window as we pulled away from the curb, the breeze on my face melting my tension for a short-lived reprieve as the minivan first accelerated then slowed to a stop after being signaled by the guardian of all things ride-share-related for a little tete-a-tete with our driver.  He said something like, 


“You can’t pick them up back there!” to which our driver said, 


“There were no other minivans, so I told them it was ok!” to which the guy who would offer to watch the class while the teacher was in the bathroom replied, 


“Yeah, but maybe the other people in the line (we were first in line) needed a minivan.  You do that again and you’re OUT OF HERE!”


…and we sped away.  Our driver later told us that it’s not uncommon to get banned from the LAX ride-share for making simple mistakes.  He liked it better the way it used to be before Uber and Lyft.  So did I.  


Driving to our house in Santa Monica is a straight shoot down Lincoln, quite possibly one of the ugliest stretches of American sprawl you can ever hope to not be stuck in traffic on.  Each donut shop, 7-11, liquor store, Chic-Fil-A, CVS pharmacy and weed apothecary we sped by peeled back another layer of the Taco Bell Chalupa Supreme of my soul to ultimately reveal what could only be described as carne-emptiness. 


I had spent two months living in beauty–both form and function.  The air wasn’t chocking me.  The water didn’t taste like chlorine, yet here I was, staring down a quickie mart that looked straight out of Grand Theft Auto 5, covered in trash, smelling like piss while people came and went with 2 gallon soft-drink cups in one hand and a hotdog or hot-lamp baked pizza slice drooping in the other.  


We got home and unpacked.  It felt strange to be back in the house again.  No one could flush the toilet right because they were having trouble finding the handles (after pushing buttons on the top of the reservoir for months on end).  Everything was just a little off.  Everything was just left when you thought it was right but nothing so jarring as Lincoln Boulevard in bright daylight.


Later I climbed into bed with AM and we pulled the covers up almost over our heads.   For the first time a familiarity overcame me and I was lulled to sleep almost immediately.  The next morning I was struck by the duality of it all–of being so sad to be somewhere you no longer wanted to be, but so unbelievably happy to sleep in your own bed.  Sometimes we need small wins to continue on. 


Shot on a LeicaM7, Kodak Tri-X pushed +2 at the Icon. 


The Work Pt3

This is a complex tale.  I’ll tell it over a couple entries. Here’s part 3.  Part 1 can be found here.


In fact, I was so inside out by then that what had originated as sheer and utter loathing  for for my career had metastasized into a hatred of the creative process and began oozing out over every aspect of my life.  Nothing was spared including my other passion–you know, the one I pay to partake in?  That spigot I faithfully turned whenever the urge to create came front and center?  I began to loath photography.  But was my job-body-count the root cause?   


The more I grew disenchanted with my career the more I turned my ire on my images.  Shit, not just my images, but my process, my muses, my camera and even the fucking film in it.  All of it was slowly turning to shit.  I would go to my museums and go through the motions, all of a sudden, completely aware that I was going through the motions.  All the frames I was finding felt uninspired; felt iterative; felt false and empty.  I found myself making silly mistakes like forgetting to rewind the film before opening the cover.  Or more than once forgetting to turn off the damn M7 so the batteries would run out and I wouldn’t be able to shoot.  I would tell myself that I had done it by accident but the relief I felt when not being able to shoot made me wonder if I wasn’t subconsciously sabatoging myself to avoid feeling a sense of failure that I had never had with photography.  Images and the making of those images has always been an outlet that I measure by my own enjoyment, so what the fuck was going on?  It wasn’t just my unhappiness with work or that I was 20kg overweight.    


I would shoot reams and reams of frames and wouldn’t process them because in my mind I had already decided that they were substandard.  How did I know this you may wonder?  What magic, crystal ball, tea-leaf bullshit whispered such sorrow in my ear you may be asking yourself.  


Fucking instagram of course.  Fucking social media.  


…and boy did that shit sneak up on me.  Initially I just wanted a place to show my work to a broader audience, one at the intersection of my career and the pros and the wannabes like me.  Exposure there felt crucial in a way and if you believe in your work–and by work I mean the real work of image creation–then you want that work to be seen by as many and as diverse and audience as possible.  Over time I had developed (pun intended) a decent following and most images were getting a fair amount of likes.  It took time and was it’s own process but again, the idea was only to get the work seen.  


In the beginning I thought “getting the work seen” meant “getting feedback, good or bad” and continuing to develop at my own pace.  But after a while “getting the work seen” seem to mean “getting more likes and comments than the last posting” and just like my career pendulum swing from “always learning something on a job” to “brute force,” my creative pendulum was well on it’s way from “learning to improve the work” to “being liked and appreciated for what I post.”  I had gone from enjoying my hobby to inadvertently creating Chris Noellert Fucking Street Photography LTD dot COM.  I was unconsciously creating a brand, like one of my clients, fishing for clicks and views and the reality of this intersection between my two passions was too much for me to handle.


My self doubt and self consciousness had invaded my creative sphere and armed with its inverse-Midas-touch was slowly turning everything that was creative gold to complete and utter shit.  And what a vicious cycle that turned out to be.  Like a proper brand manager in crisis, I started curating and shooting more of the images that got lotsa likes rather than the images that I wanted to create…  I began to pander to a style that I though would get the most attention–postulating that these images were good because they were liked so they must be good because they were like because they must be good.  


But with each iteration, public interest waned and whatever creativity that existed in the original concepts was watered down more and more, the ideas becoming fuzzier and more nondescript–a VHS copied to many times, until there’s more error than image. A couple hundred likes dropped to 50 or 40 and I felt like the world hated me and hated my art and I hated the world I hated my art, just like I hated my job and my job hated and me and just like I hated my body and my body hated me.     


So then one day I just stopped.  I stopped it all.  I crashed–bluescreen.  My brand failed.  I failed.  I hated it all.    


Shot on a LeicaM7, Kodak Tri-X pushed +2 at the Icon. 

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