THIS, HERE, LIGHT
there's a world outside the street | i shoot it mostly with a fuji x100 | my name is i.m. ruzz
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crossfield / alberta
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prairie nights / alberta
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crossfield gas plant / alberta
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alberta
this is where it was taken. i don’t know what road it is, it begins as limit ave in crossfield, and becomes a nameless road in google maps.
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i’ve been contemplating this place i live long hours and it’s given me fits for a year and a half. how to explain it. how to tell the story other than the story of how and why i’m here. it’s boiled down to the enormity of the spaces around me. it’s boiled down to a question of how can it be not enough yet too much at the same time. where long stretches of being entirely unhappy, or underwhelmed by small town life get decimated by wave after wave of incomprehensibly massive storm clouds.
it’s taken 15 or 16 months to start to see some returns on my time here and all this thinking. time to quiet my mind. time to put myself out of the frame for a while. let my own story exhaust itself and make room for something else.
someone told me yesterday i should be ashamed for asking for help from people who follow one of my blogs and i wonder in our hyper social times if the immediacy of things, and the narrow view of most compress our options and don’t allow enough time to let small seeds grow into something more. it takes a ridiculously thick skin to live your life by any different standards than “the norm”. which is to say if money and things don’t mean more to you than time you’re not worth the air you take up and you’re weighed and measured long before could ever explain the nuances of how you make sense of things.
i often feel out of place in large social groups because i can’t use my new watch, or my just in style time perfect pair of shoes to explain that i get it. because the judgements in our modern life come fast and hard. you have to shake them off if you can.
my ego has taken it’s share of lumps in the last two years at the same time as losing faith in my body to perform when i need it to has left me feeling really isolated from the world i photograph most of the time.
i struggle with that mostly because everything in my experience tells me (and i’ve lived many variations of the lives i see through my viewfinder) that i don’t wan’t those lives. i don’t want that furious race to show the world who i am through what i drive, or wear, or who i fuck.
i want to understand things, to see them clearly. to feel them and developing those skills takes large blocks of time, focused energy, and either a love of punishment or a blind commitment to something you can’t quite explain but feel very deeply.
all of which seems to put me at odds more and more each day with the world working around me.
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while out exploring another abandoned farm yesterday we noticed a big fire off to the north (turned out to be a grass fire). pictures of the actual fire are coming later today.. for now though, using the farm as a frame.
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small town life
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