THE PIRATE HIMSELF
Welcome aboard!
Bridger is the name, glad to have you here. This is a bit about me, ya know, a get-to-know-you ordeal. I love video games, pirates, longboarding, any shade of green, orange, blue, and doing almost anything outside (but I hate taking pictures).
From the bins of Lego bricks to the aerosol aromas I cooked up in my backyard, the drive to create has always permeated deeply within the wrinkly pink folds of my brain. One thing I miss from my adolescence are my tadpole-people, my lack of composition, and the stubbornness to learn any basics of art. I’m such a sucker for naive art, folk art and anything that is outside the realm of traditional art. The pureness that this type of art possesses is something I love, something to die for and it serves as a fantastic influence. This influence floods into my collages, they are unruly, stenciling feels rebellious, and printmaking reminds me of process which becomes meditative. I also find that photography is one of the best ways of splattering my brain juice out into the world. Something about the candid, storytelling, in-the-moment nature of folk art/naive art is something I try to replicate with photography. Stories are meant to be shared, to be seen, to be told, photography has an exceptional power to do that.
Of course, we all have eyes, we can come to an agreement of what's physically in front of us, but that changes when it becomes a photograph, what you see and what I see while looking through the eyes of someone else has now become entirely different, what's really in front of us? What story is being told? What did the photographer see that we didn’t?
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A night out on the tall grasses of the western plains a boy lay there solemnly, a star streaked across the bowl of charcoal high above, creating an imperfect performance for him.
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Where I started.
I started taking pictures way back in my middle school photography class, to be honest I don't really remember much besides taking pictures with an actual camera other than my phone (I’ve always had one in my back pocket growing up). At the time, photography didn’t register as anything more than just a hobby, let alone recognizing it as a form of visual art. I dabbled here and there, I took a photography class in highschool pre-covid. The teacher couldn't have been worse, which could've killed my love for taking photos if it weren't for something my friends and I found at the back of Walmart.
It was there, deep in the far reaches of this suburban super-mart, that we found it, disposable cameras. It seemed almost too foolish to purchase a 27$ camera, when we already had devices that could do that and more, but something about the delayed gratification from this thing called “film” was enough for our foolish adolescence. An eager following months ensued, buying and filling up our cameras just to cash them in at our nearest pharmacy store became a force of habit. Picking up the prints with my friends has now become some of my fondest memories, nothing beat the excitement of jumping into our hot summer cars to viciously tear open those candid bundles of joy.