Too Many Images... The Rug

Not everything needs to mean something.

When I was in high school I wrote a lot of poems and stories - along with taking pictures. Naturally, when I went to college I took English and writing classes. My second year I was fortunate enough to go on a sort of student exchange to Madrid. I say "sort of" because I was a nanny as well. I was in a cradle of poetry and art and took those classes. It was the deconstruction of the poems that frustrated me. Lorca, Neruda... Did these writers actually think so much about the mechanics? Did every couplet and it's contents have profound meaning, tempo, rhythm?

My writing, as you might be able to tell, is quite free and sometimes garbled (Thank you to my sister for degarbeling some of it). I write what I think and often - as I have been told by those close to me - you can hear my voice. This is the way I think and speak, for better or for worse.

Perhaps my simplistic way of doing things allows you, the viewer or reader, to know just exactly who I am... scaaaaary! My photography, just as my writing, doesn't generally have any hidden meaning. I see what I see and I reeeeeeeally want you to see it too.

Several years ago, in a photographic lull, I was refinishing furniture. Craigslist got me a bunch of deals. On one occasion I got a whole bunch of cabinets from a lab or something, that still populate my studio and hideaway much of my project materials(junk). On another occasion I got a storage unit of contents. You have seen the TV shows, oh like "Storage Wars". This one wasn't an auction, no drama, the guy just wanted to get rid of grandma's stuff. There were some neat items, furniture pieces I have since sold, a super 8 film trimmer (still in the attic), Super 8 real (I still haven't seen the contents) and a loverly Victorian rug... I am often skeptical of the origins of "soft goods" (no one wants to imagine gross stuff on used blankets or rugs).

This rug is beautiful, no weird stains on the back so I steam cleaned it and it became a staple of my library and then studio. As time has progressed with model sessions and concept shoots the rug has become an icon of such sessions. I know what you are thinking now... "I am reading a blog post about a rug???" In my mind there is a neat dichotomy between, say, a street scene and a fancy Victorian rug. I hadn't really given it much thought until I was packing up for my Lamborghini shoot a few weeks ago and I had this vision of the car on the rug; fancy car, fancy rug, it might seem cool... to me.

The rug has gone to a lot of shoots and events even. I didn't set out for this rug to be some kind of branding ploy and now after years of being stuffed into my car or truck and shlepped from here to there, washed and dirtied a few times over, it is starting to show some wear.... there is a hole beginning in a crease where the thread has given out, the fringes are a bit tattered. But it gets vacuumed with regularity in the studio and each client that comes in steps on to that rug without knowing it's history.

But you know it doesn't have to mean something. I just think it's pretty and classes up a place. When you happen through my portfolios or if you see me at an event or happen by, chances are I will have my big, red, second hand, Victorian rug - at least for a few more years. Take a snap with your phone, maybe someday the rug will be famous or it will start some fad. But for Heaven's sake don't always take things so seriously.

And yes you did just read a blog about a rug in too many images.

As Always,

Kyra

(live from Mexico)