Combined Daily Self-Portraits

I finally got to hear Karl Baden's comments about these combined self-portraits -- that only one of the sets worked for him because it had some visual continuity between the images. I understand his reservation, but I'm not sure I want to do anything about it. 

For me, the issue of having images from such different eras in my photographic life, 1972,73 and now, 2008,09, make the work inherently more interesting. Times have changed radically. So have I. And so have the technical aspects. I like the disparity, though I understand why he thinks that the current images look like 'snapshots' and don't compliment the early work.

I've never been entirely fond of photographs. I'm more interested in what's behind them, what's left out of the frame, the unseen and the unheard. For me, video would have been a far more effective medium, but I was wed to still photographs both because of my own obsession with memory and because of expense. 

I can't say that I was entirely in control of the early daily self-portraits, that I truly chose the format that would best represent something about who I was then. Nor did I ever particularly favor the very formal quality. But those photographs pretty well represent a sense of detachment and more than slight depression that characterized my life. 

In some says, I like the extremely casual nature of the new digital, color images because it's less controlled and has less sense of 'construction.'