The dark lands of my please forgets..

My partner suggested I write about photography and my creative process, but instead I have been sitting around for a month trying to get over some private crazy horror story I’ve generated out of nowhere about writing anything at all. A horror which I wasn't even aware was still there, lurking in the dark lands of my please forgets, until the suggestion to write was made to me. Again..

 

At the best of times I find writing a difficult and draining exercise. This is not just because I am quite a bad dyslexic, but because trying to find the right way to use words to accurately describe thoughts, feelings and ideas, is really difficult. And, when it also involves having to express private abstract thought pathways, using photography as a creative medium, then yes, it is very draining too. With this said, I have, over time learned how to carefully, with expertise, avoid most opportunities to write about my work, but I have been finding out recently, after several glorious years without hardly a word scribed, that I now do not think I can personally move forward as a photographer unless I start writing about my relationship to photography and start getting comfortable doing it.

 

 

Once upon a time I would have said something like this: Photography is the only creative medium I have found where I can express myself more clearly and coherently over any other and therefore anything I could possibly write in words about it is going to be somehow less than looking at the work itself, on its own. In the past this immediate inability to find these words would have led me to think that maybe my pictures might not have been enough on their own. The fact that someone needed to ask me about them would have also sent me into a debilitating tailspin of self doubt about my ability as a photographer and later my credibility as a human being. This was once upon a time though and If truth be told, I don't even think this was ever really my truth. What it really was, was my first and original excuse to not have to write about my work. 

 

 

 

I think it would be safe to assume that for most of us, our first actual contact with writing about our photographs came in the early stages of our photo journey, when we found ourselves, for one reason or another, needing to have to write an artist's statement. These generally came from an outside agent, as a request. The prospect of writing one of these statements generally filled us with dread and demanded of us that we dig deep to do it. They took a long time to write too and when it was done we tinkered with it endlessly and forever afterwards..

 

 

 

Of course it is difficult to write an artist’s statement and no one ever said it was going to be easy. They are still difficult to write. Writing about photography on any level gets difficult quickly. Photography is about perception and perception is about the state of being or the process of becoming aware of something through the senses. This is difficult writing terrain to navigate at the best of times, for anyone and the path through it is almost always one which descends steeply, into the subjective marshwoods of identity and memory and across treacherous terrains of truth and untruth. It will also ask who is it that looks through the viewfinder and who it is that is reflected back at us when we look at a print. The photographs are the psychic breadcrumbs we have left behind us on our journey, which lead us back to the seat of that supernatural self and heart of the camera operator. Over and out...