Above is a selection of my most recent polaroid project. This project is the culmination of two others- the Experimental Polaroid Archive (2018-present) and my Sunday Sky series from 2023. I combined the alteration techniques of the Experimental series (such as applying extreme temperatures, chemicals, and physically bending the exposures) to the Zen inspired introspection of the Sky photographs. I have included examples from both of the series below.

I am (purposely) moving slow on this new Experimental Sky series. Each photograph takes many days of trials and waiting for an optimal plot of sky. I am planning on releasing a book of the full Sunday Sky 2023 series later this year, however I am not sure of what a final product for the Experimental Sky project will look like. I will likely share samples from the series to accent posts on this blog moving for the time being. Stay tuned.

One of the main goals of the series is to exercise my mindfulness, a task much easier said than done. I spend an incredible amount of time in my own head, worrying, thinking, and daydreaming. Over the years I feel like I’ve become disconnected from my body. In an effort to increase both my mindfulness as well as my awareness of my own body I have recently started studying the history and art of mime. The history is utterly fascinating. Below is an excerpt from the “Ancient Greece and Rome” section of the wikipedia article:

Under the Empire mime became the predominant Roman drama, if with mixed fortunes under different emperors. Trajan banished mime artists; Caligula favored them; Marcus Aurelius made them priests of Apollo. Nero himself acted as a mime. The mime was distinguished from other dramas by its absence of masks, and by the presence of female as well as male performers. Stock characters included the lead (or archymimus[a]), the stooge or stupidus, and the gigolo, or cultus adulter.

My study of mime has recently brought me to a wonderful book by a student of Marcel Marceau named Claude Kipnis entitled, of course, The Mime Book. It beautifully breaks down different aspects of mime.

Recently my wife and I adopted a cat who we affectionately named Marceau after the great mime. I’ve owned many cat over the years and he is by far the strangest. He is extremely calm despite being just over a year old. His calm may be due to the slight cold he had at the Cat Cafe we adopted him from, or perhaps to him adjusting to his new surroundings. As he recovers we’ll just have to see how he changes. I have included a photograph of him “posing” with a stuffed lemur (the mascot of Lemures Books) on a blanket of clouds below.

This evening I plan on working on et la pluie dit and perhaps reading a bit from Barbara O’Brien’s The Circle of the Way: A Concise History of Zen from the Buddha to the Modern World. I have really enjoyed the dozen or so pages I’ve read so far and am excited to keep diving deeper. What are you reading now and how are you enjoying? Please comment below! I always love book recommendations.