Panoptikal*: LAX Relax (December 10, 2000)

Thursday, September 24, 2009

LAX Relax (December 10, 2000)

There's something about Los Angeles airport. Not something I find pleasant, mind you--just that certain feeling the place has, or rather, that it has for me personally. In this image, taken on the way to New Zealand (LA is almost unavoidable as a stop), I feel as if I've captured something of the mood, some kind of representation of the sort of memories I associate with LAX.

The primary association for me is tiredness, exhaustion, a kind of mid-journey melting point at which you're either bleary-eyed and facing a trans-Pacific flight, or zombified and heading into another 4 hours' "layover" in the lounges of LAX followed by a 6-hour flight home to winter, and two weeks of jet-lag. If the floor is going to start moving around mysteriously beneath your feet, it's LA where it will happen. If your ears like to plug themselves after multiple take-off and landing routines, by the time you reach Los Angeles you're likely to be semi-deaf. And so the image of this fellow, who was taking a nap in the departure lounge while waiting for a Malaysian Airlines flight to Taipei, is basically iconic when it comes to the misery of low-budget intercontinental air travel.

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More about...

The pictures I post here were taken between 1994 and today. There are some breaks during that period, generally because I had no working camera, or because I processed many negatives and made few prints (generally this is the case for 1994 to 2000 or so). I also have many prints from that time that have not yet been digitised.

The reason I call this a "photojournal" is that I tend to document my life with images, where possible, rather than words. I find it much easier to remember moments, and then events, when I have some kind of picture with which I can associate them. This is probably why I've always taken pictures when I could--even when there was "nothing" to photograph--and why I have such a difficult time keeping up a written diary or journal of any sort.

Technicalities

I've used a number of cameras over the past 15 years or so. The bulk of these were SLR, manual or semi-automatic, and of course non-digital (35mm film) cameras (photos shot from 1994 to 2004, roughly), though for a period I used both (low-quality) digital and film (around 2002-2003).

I first used a fully manual camera when I was 14, which was borrowed; the first SLR that I owned was a Vivitar, which rapidly deteriorated. It was followed by a Pentax, and after that, the Minolta XD-11 that I have used for film ever since. I use it with a 35mm or a 28-70mm lens with telephoto and macro. In addition to these, I also used Mamiya 220 and 330 medium-format (120 film) cameras while at NSCAD in 1997-8, and very occasionally, I used an old Agfa range-finder (from roughly the 1940s) which produced 6x9cm negatives on 120 film.

The first digital camera I used would probably have been in 2002, and I used it periodically over about a year (it was borrowed). In 2004-05 I again used a digital camera (also borrowed; specs not available); I stopped shooting on film beyond 2004 because of the expense. Finally in October 2006 I bought a Sony CyberShot, 7.2 megapixels, a very small camera (not an SLR) that I used for almost 4 years before replacing it with a CyberShot DSC-TX5, in July 2010. This camera now travels with me almost everywhere and is the only camera I use regularly.