In the late nineties, a few underground "art sites" started emerging that I found extremely interesting and influential. Sites that have long since been lost into internet obscurity. Sites that would use the medium of web to actually try to make new and interesting experiences drawing on old ideas like books. I saw some sites where trying to even understand the meaning of them, or how to navigate to enter them were in themselves a cryptic challenge.

Then around 2000 I saw the lovely "experiences" section of whatdoesnotchange.org, which, one photo at a time the author leads you through a very personal journey of events, thoughts, and experiences. I would get a perfect sense of what it was like to be in the various pictured settings from the accompanying text that was only given to you a little at a time. In the pre-photoblog, pre-cheap-digital-SLR-explosion era and pre-movabletype/wordpress/blogger era, I was really impressed with the artistic quality of this effort and had decided i wanted to create something very similar.

In 2002, I decided to finally start an "art website" of my own, beautybeneath.com [mirror], complete with hidden image map links and hidden info and poetry commented in the source code. My original thought was that it would be a site that wasn't defined as any one thing; that it would defined over time with whatever new idea or mood i was having the next week. i wanted to take a step backwards from the traditional purpose of the internet which has always been about nonlinear fast access to information, and instead force a linear experience like reading a book, always leaving more waiting for you.

I had always had an interest in photography, but never owned a real camera. I primarily liked drawing, painting, and collage, and I had envisioned a presentation of all of these for my website, wanting a very organic experience of analog things like pencil and typewriter on the site instead of text and digital graphics. Photos were meant to be just a small part of that to sometimes accompany my drawings.

After telling only a few stories to accompany photos I shot on borrowed cameras to present on beautybeneath.com, i found it extremely rewarding. Ideas and experiences that I was trying to capture for years through the metaphors of drawings or paintings or poetry I found to be captured perfectly, literally, and lucidly through photographs I shot and words I had taken down while they was fresh in my head.

I found myself posting less and less artwork and more and more photos until it got to the point where i spent 400 dollars on my first real camera, a minolta maxxum 9000 35mm suite, and altogether stopped the other outlets of drawing or painting.

By the first month of 2003 I had become fully overtaken by wanting to learn more about photography and wanting to shoot everything in my life. here are some pictures from some of the first rolls i ever shot when i first decided to get into photography, from late 2002:

Right at this time new digital SLR models hit the market at record cheap prices, and blogging software was free and available via movabletype, blogger and the like. The photoblog scene exploded and I really realized I wasnt alone in wanting living a documented reflective life.

A lot of fantastic photoblogs emerged from amazing photographers, like quarlo.com, chromogenic.net to name a couple, but alot, A LOT, of crap saturated the genre. While artsy photoblogs were still a relatively underground thing, beautybeneath.com enjoyed lots of linking and mentions among the 20 or so top known photoblogs, but by 2004 you were nobody if you didnt have a digital SLR and accompanying blog.

I got disappointed with the whole state of things, and my blog had been buried under mountains of people's uninspired digital photos, stamped across the middle with their ridiculously large photographer credits, as if the fact that they bought a canon 10D and shot photos of flowers and breasts now gave them the status of "Professional" or "Fine Art" photographer. I didn't see a whole lot of people doing what i was doing with strictly film photos and organic elements, yet my site was depreciated in the saturated genre of photoblogs, so i stopped doing the site around 2006 to re-plan. I never stopped shooting photos.

After not touching it for nearly two years, I saw that my domain name was soon expiring and thought for 30 days about whether i would ever use it again. I knew i should renew it even if i never would, but for some reason i really didnt care. 30 more days after the domain was deleted from the registry, it occurred to me that i really wanted to start the site again. beautybeneath was just a perfect name still for what I wanted to continue with, but i let it fall apart. it collapsed. so here you have at the end of 2008, a continuation. the beautiful collapse.

The name only partially is reference to my previous site name beautybeneath.com. beautifulcollapse.com is mainly an acknowledgement that we are on an incredibly messed up sinking ship in this world, and it is amazing that we still find time to find and experience beauty. I think knowing that the ship is sinking makes you cherish and appreciate everything that much more. Jesus is NOT coming to rapture us up to heaven, so this life does count. The afterlife is bullshit, so contrary to some popular belief, this one counts and is in fact all we have.

Some photographers that have influenced my photos are:
Grant Brittain, Atiba Jefferson, David Lachappelle, Justin Oullette, Dmitri Von Klein.

Most photos on my site are shot with a Pentax 645N medium format camera and a single wireless flash unit.

My favorite films are Kodak e-100vs, Fuji Velvia 100, Ektachrome 64, and Iflord Delta 3200

This site was written in TextPad and utilizes movabletype blogging software and mootools javascript framework. I employ Christophe Beyls' Slimbox package. I'm a non-mac user.

to learn more about me: shawnkilmer.com

Thanks