The Spanish Movie Project

Back when I was just starting my second go round with professional photography, I did a lot of silly little projects just for the practice of developing an idea, shooting it, and then producing a compelling little sequence of photos. One of the more silly efforts was the Spanish Movie Project.

Back when I was living in Paris I read a review of a film about a poorly educated photographer from a small backwater town in Spain. Paris was a great place for seeing obscure art films, even better than New York. In this example, the photographer went to Manhattan and got very excited about the New York Skyline and set out to photograph it. The joke was that he thought he was doing original work, that no one else had ever thought to photograph the skyscrapers in Manhattan. Unfortunately, I never got to see the film (and have been unable to find it), but the plot summary stuck in my memory.

So when I came to New York and had a lot of time to kill in the financial district, it occurred to me to come at it from that perspective, as a yokel who had never seen a tall building or dense cityscape. Of course I had been that yokel growing up, so I didn’t really need too much a stretch of the imagination to see New York through those eyes.

I make my little jokes, but cell phone photography has created billions of people working on their own Spanish Movie Projects.

So here’s another one for ya. How many Spanish Movie Projects have been done on this landmark (which I’d be happy to sell you, btw)?

Mentioning Paris above took me a little ways down memory lane. I don’t usually mention I lived there as I’ve found most people just don’t want to hear about it, or think I’m somehow bragging. I would never talk about that part of my life at my current job. I have to bite my tongue to keep from talking about New York, or pretty much anywhere that’s not Florida. But Paris was such a huge thing in my life and now I find I hardly think of it and have to struggle a bit to find specific memories. Perhaps that’s related to the fact that I didn’t photograph anything while I was there, so have no images to reference. Odd how that works, eh? And how things would have been so very different if decent digital cameras had been developed 40 years earlier.

Ah well, perhaps it’s better to have memories that don’t include holding a camera? That sounds very sane and responsible on the surface, dunnit? Though I don’t think I really believe it. On the contrary, I could argue that I enjoy places more as a photographer. The camera is in the bag most of the time and I’m just soaking up the look and feel of a place. But I also begin to see places as compositions, and that adds a layer of enjoyment. Plus I like processing the photos and then looking at them or getting them published.

So for me at least, all that nostalgia for a time before digital, just doesn’t hold water. Of course it would be nice if everyone else wasn’t photographing everything, but we’ve all got our own Spanish Movie Projects to work on, eh.

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