Where next?
Where next?
As I’m starting 2021, I’m starting a process to decide the directions of this blog, sort of split between two stools: first is to keep it a general sort of blog about my practice and the second is to make it more academic in nature, using theory as the main subject, start a questioning thread to aid research and assist in the next step of my research journey. Just in case you didn’t know I’m hopefully starting my PhD studies this year although each month sees them edge back a little further from definition.
The latter is a little scary as there is always the thought that you may end up looking naïve or a little stupid in your thoughts and questioning, reflecting on the reason behind that feeling I realise that I’m really only 2 years into established study via my MA but have been working on the periphery for 4 years preceding that with my 25 years of photographic work via my other guise which is separate from UT but feeds into in nonetheless.
The theory that it’s my blog so I can do what I think and as not many are reading it, so I guess I can do what I like, consider this me just throwing it out there.
I tried many times to write blogs for my other profiles, but they always ended up coming a bit unstuck, mainly because of time, anxiety, not wanting to rock the boat, not wanting to offend, confidentiality or risking working environments which sometimes lead them to be a touch boring or ambiguous or rambling or well you get the idea. Any blog I do, does run a fine line between being one of the following: vaguely entertaining, shouting into the void, confusing via my usual style of stream of conscience writing or a mix of all of them.
I will ponder this further..
Continuing on with this blog, I noticed recently that life works again in those reinforcing structures, example being when you start thinking about a subject then it starts to manifest itself in your feeds via articles, tweets and the such like (That’s not just me is it? Or is it those algorithms?)
I’ve recently seen a few of these speaking on or against the ideas that photography can be something more, or on the theorising of photography, one premise is that you should just make images and just let them speak for themselves etc etc.
I always feel a little sad when I read these as I feel like it’s a rally against thought, finding information or education or further thought or the such like, I mean everyone decodes an image to an extent it’s just that some go a little farther and some farther still. It reminds me of when someone says, “you think too much!” (again, is it just me that people say that too?) I always want to ask what the correct amount of thinking should be then, or should I not think at all or should I only think about things and not say anything or……..but then apparently I’ve proved their point and they win.
In short, I think that is blog will go for a mixture of these approaches, see this as a warning that I will be attempting to make certain posts more academic in tone and explore thought based subject matter. I’m sure that my style will not allow it to go solely down that route though, especially as I see a large part of urgent temporality (UT) raison d'etre as exploring absurdity in its many forms, so I expect some absurd writing to complement this.
As an attempt to illustrate these two directions, I will attempt in my next two blogs to follow the 2 separate discourses. First one being a thought based one on archiving, reflection and though and the second one will write about my reading of Vilém Flusser’s book “Towards a philosophy of photography
Thank you.
PS. There is also a great need to produce an image for each of these blogs, I will use this to attempt to establish a visual narrative exclamation of what UT is all about, I’ll post on insta and use as a thumbnail for each blog but it may or may not have anything to do with the post. I’ll write 20 words about each image to help with understanding, as I didn’t do that with the last one, I’ll do it now
The last one was all about the – New Year is a restart, a reset in what you’d like to do but sometimes the old year overlaps through.
This new one is all about – The old year is still hanging on, but it is soon to be gone so what’s next to alight upon.
Cheers.