Hwhup The Deans List? The Jason Dean here, bringing you another end to a weekend like it looked at me funny.

Let’s get to it!

Art

We’re starting this week’s art class with another photo of The Apple. If you recall, I’m a part of an art project through The Bonifas Art Center where I daily create art over a 100 day period. We are fast approaching the last month of that project, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to sit down with 100 days of my ‘The Apple’ photos and create Mega The Apple.

This is a photo I took of it on January 29. The Apple is sitting on a laptop screen with photos of The Apple providing the lighting below. I love the colors and different layers of the little glass bubbles that swirl around the inside of The Apple while lines of light are drawn into the stem like a brown black hole.

Maybe I should title this one ‘Event Horizon’.

In other news, weather. As I sit here writing this newsletter, here in Marquette we are sitting through a Winter Storm warning that is set to last through 8:00 PM tonight and that has actually delivered on its promise, unlike that last system.

Man…to think that I was surprised enough that spring might not have actually sprung that I actually wrote about it and put it on the Internet! I wish I could go back in time and sit down with that sweet, naive young Jason, holding his face in my hands as I look into his innocent, gullible eyes…and just slap that ridiculous nonsense out of him. Seriously- did I really think that winter was gone? Had I actually allowed the hope of spring to blossom in my heart?

Now that I’m older and wiser, I can tell you with 100% certainty that winter is here to stay and so I am going to share winter photos until the sun melts them out of my cold, dead hands.

ALL HAIL WINTER

Now for something completely different.

Every so often in life, God/the universe gives you little nods of encouragement, like ‘yeah! I’m proud of you you’re on the right path keep doing what you’re doing’.

Last weekend, I got one of those little nods when our local photography gang met for our monthly meeting at Second Story Studio in Downtown Marquette. Every month, we each bring a photo to share based around a theme, and the theme for March’s meeting was green. Now I have lots of green photos that I really like- trees and leaves and grass and the gorgeous Simic shadings of the waves at Presque Isle’s Black Rocks. I could have easily played it safe and chose one of those.

Instead, I decided to take a risk and bring one of my more abstract photos. I say it’s a more abstract photo because in addition to being an abstract subject, it was also taken using an abstract technique (intentionally trying to take a blurry, out-of-focus photo). I was really nervous to share it! I mean, I’ve shared the image before…but that was online, on my Facebook page with an audience of people that know my aesthetic and vibe with it. This was sitting in a room of my peers, people who I’ve seen wield cameras with precision and technical skill that I aspire to, without the context of ‘Yeah…he actually takes and shares photos like this all the time and we like it’. Not only that, we were sitting in an art studio, surrounded by gorgeous and thoughtful art. I remember sitting there thinking ‘it’s not too late to just share a picture of a wave!’.

I decided to share it, hoping that I would find kindness and gentleness in the collective confusion over what I called a ‘photograph’. Actually, it went over way, WAY better than I could have ever hoped. People seemed to really like the image, it spurred great conversation about different kinds of techniques to capture creative images and Taryn blew me away by printing the image on the spot (which was INSANELY cool and thoughtful and WOW). I sat there for several minutes holding the freshly printed photo in my hands, dumbfounded at how I could have made such a beautiful piece of art.

Folks, I’m not being falsely modest when I say I’ve had a difficult time thinking of myself as an artist. I was a quiet kid who read books until he discovered sports and then just sort of followed sports and lived life until my late 30s. Sure I’ve done artistic stuff, but I rarely FEEL like an artist. This year, I’m slowly overcoming that. I’m starting to feel like not only am I an artist but that I belong in those spaces. Thanks to the Society of the Finch Secret for making me feel like I belong, and to all the people who have played a part in my journey and growth. 

Writing

Here’s a piece I wrote titled ‘Follow’. It’s related to today’s Philosophy class.

It seems,
No matter how high
I soar,
I’ll never catch your
Eye
Because I never have
Before

Field Trip

This week, I found myself on the other side of the camera helping out a fellow photographer (Jacob) with some Kombucha photography for a brand gig he has going on. I’ll share some images from that shoot as able, but I had the most fun time being a ‘model’! We shot at South Beach in Marquette, the only beach in Marquette with playground equipment and if you know anything about me you know that OF COURSE I was down for playing on any and all pieces of that playground equipment even though they weren’t designed for use by someone of my size. Jacob is a fantastic photographer and artist, and an even better dude. You should check out his work and give him a follow. And if you like ‘booch, try Island City Kombucha. I was able to sample the Bee Power Honey flavor, a mix of black tea and honey, and loved every sip.

Philosophy

A couple of weeks ago, a photographer I follow on Instagram with a good size following (about 50k followers) made a post asking for people to share their work with him so he could highlight it in his upcoming publication. Pretty innocuous, right? What a great guy, using his platform for good, eh?

Maybe. I think it might have been self-serving as all get out.

Let me explain, lest you think I’m lobbing stones at people living in glass houses. See, social media is driven by algorithms. Now I can’t tell you anything substantive about algorithms- if you want to learn more, there’s a great YouTube video about it here- but algorithms determine why you see what you see on social media. Basically if people interact with your posts, it tickles the algorithm and the algorithm likes to be tickled so it shares it with more people for more tickles and eventually your post becomes Viral Elmo.

Photographers that already have a decent sized following start off with more people that see their posts, so they already have their metaphorical fingers near the algorithm’s metaphorical armpits. And when they do these sort of ‘hey fellow (read: small-time) photographers, show me your work’ posts, it’s like lighting the beacons for those of us who were wondering where was Gondor when the Westfold fell. We small-time photographers like to believe that we will receive the credit and adulation we deserve if only people get to see our work and realize how incredibly visionary we are or something. So we drink these requests up, sharing our photos on the posts of bigger photography accounts in hopes that this could be the start of our big break.

No one actually discovers us, though. It’s just big accounts getting bigger while assholes like Zuckerberg and Musk make billions of dollars off of us.

Now I’m not trying to accuse the controller of this account of intentionally trying to use the craving for attention of smaller accounts to bolster his own following. He probably wasn’t doing it consciously that reasons, and I’ll even assume he had noble intentions. But it doesn’t change the fact that social media is not designed to grow platforms for artists; it’s designed by filthy rich assholes to keep you on their platforms dreaming of striking it rich while they harvest your data and get actual-filthy rich doing it.

And obviously I shared a link to my work in the comments of his post. It could lead to my big break, after all!

That’s it for another edition of ‘The Weekender’. I hope you have a great week friends, and I’ll see you around.

Jason