Why am I taking a photo of stools, orange stools? I’m not working on a Diner Stools project, and while I love the color orange (and the taste of oranges), there really is no good reason to be framing up and photographing these empty seats in a nearly empty LA diner.
Perhaps you too have been tugged out of your normal course of day and pulled to capture something so ephemeral it does not appear directly in an image. I imagine this inner nudge to take a photo as Ms Pretty Elusive - very hard to get in touch with if I try, and harder still to recall once gone. It is a bit like looking at the photo afterwards and wondering, Wasn’t there a Ms Pretty Elusive slipping out of a back booth? Or a slinky cat nipping under a chair? Something just out of sight, the creative impulse is pretty elusive and leaves no direct evidence in the frame of itself spurring us to turn these small personal moments of observation into a photograph.
My inner nudge for photographing these stools resulted in an image that I just don’t quite know what to do with. Have I been led astray by a creative urge to yet another personally interesting, tenuously meaningful, and quiet photograph in search of contemplation? Perhaps it is enough just to say, this one dances anyway, swaying into my photographic archive without music, just because orange likes to twist about.
The next time I’m out photographing, I think I’ll raise my camera in the hopes of catching another glimpse of Ms Pretty Elusive.