Scratchpad Archives — P.R. Ramer — writer & photographer

Dark coast

14 March 202430 June 2020 Leave a comment by P.R. Ramer

I’m on the beach. It’s night. The wind is still as loud as I remember it. Somehow I know I’m not really here. It’s just a nocturnal deception of closed eyes. But I walk to the sea. The skin on my feet feels repulse with the shock of the cold water, the bitterness of September’s … Read more Dark coast

Scratchpad

It depends

14 March 202422 June 2020 Leave a comment by P.R. Ramer

When I take this photograph of a paper towel, I am thinking how this is not a “good” photograph and how one might talk about the large amount of negative space in the center and lower left part of the image. I also think of how the image is only shape, color, and texture; how … Read more It depends

Scratchpad

Act Like Them

14 March 202422 May 2020 by P.R. Ramer

I act like them.
I speak like them.
I hang like them.
But I’ll never be one of them. …

Scratchpad

Introducing Scratchpad

22 May 2020 Leave a comment by P.R. Ramer

Scratchpad is now live. The purpose of Scratchpad is to have a space where I can completely disregard the idea of polish and take a more anarchic approach to art, thumbing my nose at any rules I wish to ignore. I have needed somewhere I can test out new ideas and be free to make something terrible. You should never expect anything here to be refined. It is, and always will be, a messy space.

Lines Like Flagella

22 January 2020 Leave a comment by P.R. Ramer

What I like about this image is how the lines are so delicate and curled. They remind me of the illustrations of the flagella of bacteria from my college microbiology class. The lines are reaching inward in a brief pause, perhaps, before they snap back into action.

A New Direction

12 June 2019 Leave a comment by P.R. Ramer

It is time for a change. The Liquid Roses hasn’t had a new blog post since September and little to no activity on social media from around the same time, but there are a few reasons for that. For one, college. My college photography degree has been where most of my time has gone recently (apart from my becoming-more-and-more-unhealthy consumptive relationship with social media and the Web–but I am trying to fight that as much as possible). Another reason is that the Liquid Roses took a backseat to developing a new website for my P.R. Ramer brand, the brand under which I intend to do most of my professional photography. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I came to the realization after I created my P.R. Ramer brand that the Liquid Roses’s original role had been largely supplanted.

Cradle

8 September 2018 by P.R. Ramer

There is sound from the neighboring room. There is sound and it’s an instrument being strummed. And there is a voice singing. There is a voice, and it’s singing in a tongue I don’t know. It’s singing a song and it’s soothing to me. It’s soothing and it’s swaddling my ailing mind.

Scratchpad

Grasping for Words

13 April 2018 by P.R. Ramer

Often as a writer I pour over whether what I am writing is something that should command any attention. I reach out for the ethereal words to grasp them from the semi-opaque vapors in my mind that pass for thoughts, trying earnestly to say something significant. It is nearly inexpressible how I often feel that this is an exercise in futility: I can never say it well enough. It will fail, I fear… I believe. I even wrote an untitled poem back in early March that I posted on my personal Instagram (@prramer) that spoke to this feeling of inevitable failure at words.

Alone

14 March 202415 February 2018 by P.R. Ramer

Present, living, seeing
Citizen but stranger
Unknown, insignificant

Scratchpad

As I Am

14 February 2018 by P.R. Ramer

It is gentle, soft, and whiteAnd tender, vulnerable, and pinkFull of uncertainty but comfortableI ask for nothing, expecting nothingYet there may be a home here for my soulMy heart is thankful for small gesturesI don’t know when I have ever felt so welcomeTo enter and remove the coat of my privacy and self-protectionTo seat my … Read more As I Am