I forgot how to take photos...

Plus....LANDMAN

It’s too much. Too much detail. Too much data. Too much going on.

Picking up my digital camera is overwhelming and uninteresting ever since embarking on a daily Polaroid project last year. With Polaroids, there’s limitation. No editing, no unnecessary detail, no sharpness.

When I import photos into Lightroom that I’ve taken on my Nikon Zf, I don’t even know what to do with them anymore. There’s so much resolution and detail in the shadows. With Polaroids, the shadows are dark voids of nothingness, where no life can survive.

I’m more comfortable in the void.

This week I’ve started embarking on re-learning how to use a non-Polaroid camera again, and I’m going back to my roots.

When I first got to explore the darkroom in my Intro to Photography class in college, I gravitated towards a heavy contrast style. To achieve this, I basically “cooked” my prints under the enlarger by exposing my light sensitive paper a little longer than normal. I liked the harsh blacks and the bright whites, and have always gravitated toward that look. If I’m going to use black and white in my photography, I want it to be really black and white.

Basically, I was removing detail from my shadows and highlights, much like the current iteration of Polaroid film. Explains a lot for sure.

I’m leaning in. For the past couple years I’ve been trying to “flatten” my work so that the digital images, 35mm or 120 film images, AND the Polaroids all feel the same.

I now have a starting point of how to use my digital camera again. We’ll see how it goes.

How to Take Your Polaroids to the NEXT LEVEL

This week’s video is about my ULTIMATE belief on how to take your Polaroids to a new place:

POSITIVES: Unhinged Jazz

Positives is my NEW weekly recommendations segment where I dive into the stuff I’m checking out lately, and maybe talking about culture along the way. This will eventually be a paid part of my newsletter, but for the next few weeks, I’m offering it FOR FREE with the rest of my newsletter.

The theme of this week is CHAOS. Pure, unbridled chaos.

When it comes to cultural products like movies, tv, and music, I often find chaos to be a good thing for finding signs of life. So many new things feel formulaic and predictable due to the data-driven nature of our distribution channels. A little imperfection or randomness feels nice.

Everything I’ve been diving into lately has had a level of unhinged-ness. That sounds somewhat vague, but I’d define “unhinged” in this case as “breaking norms and the formats of what we come to expect, but in ways that a total weirdo would do.”

For instance, I love music videos. It’s kind of a dying art, something mass culture doesn’t take part in like it used to. But I usually start the year off by looking up what the best music videos were in the previous year, and that’s often when I find out about all kinds of stuff I’ve missed. I googled “Best music videos of 2024”, and got served up the usual list of Reddit threads (that’s all Google serves up anymore). I clicked one link that seemed relevant to my search and they had a list of artists I’ve never heard of.

Woah. Ok. Next one.

huh. What subreddit is this?

Ah. Yes. The K-pop subreddit. A super niche subgenre that...wait. These videos have upwards of 30 MILLION VIEWS each.

Apparently, these are more than mainstream. A mega-popular world of music I’ve never really heard of, right under my nose. Watching these videos harkens back to early 00s videos from American pop or rock stars with some added random-ness added in. Reminds me of growing up in Hawaii and going to the Ala Moana mall with my mom. I feel like I spent a good bit of my childhood trying to fight the boredom of the women’s shoe section of Macy’s by watching music videos on the JVCs that hung from the ceiling. These K-Pop music videos give me the vibes of the random assortment of music videos that would play in the background of mundane early-2000s shopping areas. These feel new, but also just constant references to the past.

Speaking of which, I dived into Dandadan, which has been on my Netflix queue for a while. I’m kind of a secret anime fan. I’m not as deep in the weeds as I used to be, and I definitely linger in more Cowboy Bebop era stuff. New anime usually doesn’t hit me the way that the 80s, 90s, and early 00s stuff does. But, I heard a lot of really good things about Dandadan, so I dove in.

If Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh are beginner level anime, Dandadan is like playing Through the Fire and the Flames on Expert in Guitar Hero 3. It is not for the casual fan of anime.

It’s the definition of unhinged. It’s so crazy that even I would get lost in what would be going on, or why. But that was the fun of it. It was a mash-up of every anime thing I’d ever seen, all combined into one show. Aliens, ghosts, high-school drama, it’s got everything.

But again, it’s probably too wild for most people.

Well, maybe. Because the biggest show in America is actually the most unhinged thing I’ve watched this week, and it makes K-pop and Dandadan look pretty banal. Okay, not really. But it’s absolutely baffling that this show exists in the form it does.

I’m of course talking about Landman.

It’s the worst show I’ve ever seen, combined with the best show I’ve ever seen. People always point toward Yellowstone as the first in this “terrible but also good” Taylor Sheridan genre, but I find Yellowstone to be mostly terrible. It just doesn’t have the charisma that Landman has. Honestly, Billy Bob Thornton is mostly responsible for that. I’ll believe anything the man says, everything that comes out of his mouth just sounds so common sensical and obvious.

A normal show would revolve around Billy Bob Thornton’s character’s day to day and have an overarching narrative going on throughout the whole season. Not this show. We’re kind of just driving around in an M-Tex Oil truck every episode. Talking to our annoying ex-wife on FaceTime, getting on the horn with our billionaire boss Jon Hamm, giving lectures about the importance of oil to city slicker liberals, watching the budding relationships of young people, and taking senior citizens to strip clubs to get their jollies one last time before death’s sweet embrace. Oh and the cartel shows up every once in a while to cause trouble.

This show is like jazz. It just plays. It takes random twists and turns, every time you get bored, it reels you back in with some explosions or horrific oil rig accidents.

I don’t know what to make of it. It’s terrible, but I kept watching. I kept…looking forward to watching it. It became my Sunday routine, like Game of Thrones used to be. And now, my Sundays have a Landman shaped hole that I don’t know how I’ll fill until Season 2.

But really. It’s the definition of unhinged. It’s absolute chaos. Every time I thought I could predict what was next, it surprised me. Not in a good way most of the time, but surprised me nonetheless.

Culture is in a malaise of some kind when it comes to the media we consume. Most new stuff is not terrible in the Landman sense, worse actually: Most new stuff is boring. Whatever Landman is guilty of, it’s certainly not guilty of being boring, mundane, predictable, or formulaic. It made me rethink everything I want when it comes to what I consume, but also what I create. I often complain about the boring state of photography Youtube, and maybe we just need some more jazz. We need to be more unhinged. More off the wall.

We all need to be more like Landman.