Tuesday, March 2, 2010

A Visual Journal


Growing up, I never kept a journal, despised school and spent most of my time staining clothes with blood and grass and scratching my knees and elbows with my younger brother Tim. As a dyslexic, my interests and intellectual appetite quickly surpassed my ability to read. Instead of fighting tooth and nail through Charlotte's Web, I spent my time looking at pictures in books during reading time in elementary school. My first memories of an Encyclopedia were the colorful diagrams of airplanes, not a list of the 50 states and their capitals. In order to make it through school, I learned to use my visual perception and stored my experiences as etchings in my mind.

For the last three months, I have carried my camera with me. Sometimes I see special things, sometimes I see monotonous things but mostly I see juxtaposing parts of things that make up my life.

An inlet in Reid State Park in late February.

Hope on a walk in mid February.

A shanty Down East in early February.

A gray, December day in southeast Portland, Oregon right near the Hawthorne food carts.
Picnic table at Fort Popham in January.

Ed's shanty catching some rays in February in Palermo, Maine. I love the font.

Christmas lights in Portland, Oregon in December.
Pumpkins in February.

An old logging road in late December in Skamania, Washington.

Down East in early February.

Waves breaking in late February at Reid State Park. I love the meandering footsteps in the foreground.

This space shuttle crashed on a frozen lake a few miles inland in the Mid Coast region. Well actually it's just an ice shanty.

Weathered shingles on Valentine's day.

Instead of writing notable parts of my day down in a journal, I take pictures of inspiring things around me. What inspires me a year from now will certainly be different than what inspires me today. Having a collection of images and my thoughts helps me keep track of my creative process.

Here are some more links,
A Visual Journal (Picasa).

7 comments:

Deb Oh said...

My photos are definitely the closest thing I have to an actual journal - I can't even count the number of times I've tried to keep a daily journal and FAAAAILED.

Foster Huntington said...

Deb oh,
A picture is worth a thousand words and i have taken thousands of pictures so i guess i have a hundred thousand world journal. Photos are much easy to show other people,
foster

Enia Is (Almost) Here said...

Beautiful photos Foster, truly magnificent. It is funny the way we think. I love words and indeed I couldn't pull off a PhD without being able to handle them at least, but I see things visually as well. Plus there is nothing better than going back to a particular photograph and remembering a thousand things from that one image...

Foster Huntington said...

Years down the line I will look back at the pictures I took during this time in my life and remember the details of this time of my life. The most valuable thing I own is my external hard drive with all of my pictures,
foster

shari said...

love these images.

Foster Huntington said...

Shari,
I am glad you like them, thanks for the kind words,
foster

Happymom4 aka Hope Anne said...

I love your photographic journal. I especially enjoy the photos of the ocean/coast/rocks etc. I left part of my heart along the shores of the Eastern Coast during several visits there in the 1990's, and not being able to be back there for a number of years, your pictures help.