Joey, Kathi (my Mum as a child) and Grace's shadow.
Today has been a complete day of panic. For so long now, i thought i had been sure about my vision for this. A few hours ago, it struck me just how ambitious this project is. The drive alone is 100 hours. That's huge.
I began researching jazz bars to visit in each of the cities and began thinking 'how am i going to photograph these? Will i be taking portraits of the musicians? Crowd shots of people within the jazz scene? Or, empty interiors maybe?'. This is a pretty achievable thing to think through, but it lit up a bigger problem with big, fat, killing-the-world floodlights. How am i going to present my fantastical idea of America? Or the apparent truth of it? What am i going to look for? Who am i going to photograph? Is this even possible? So many questions. My heart decided that it was going to try and escape my throat.
Writing down these thoughts has calmed me though. I tend to find i can think clearer when my thoughts are in text. Although due to this, i have a huge pile of to-do lists just from the last week that i need to sort through.
I'm beginning to think that maybe i'm trying to plan too much. In my tutorial with Lewis Bush, he suggested that a big part of this project is the uncertainty, and if i research too much into the supposedly real America, i could distort my fantasy before i get there. I think this needs to be a bit more fluid, about spontaneous discoveries and experiences instead of a rigid schedule.