Rearranging the Furniture
What do you do when you have equally warring instincts to conform to peaceful order, and to abandon convention and break the rules? I think that’s actually where photography positions me very comfortably. There’s a faithfully followed method to making a good exposure, placing sharpness, balancing composition. I know how to do those things. But in the same way that mum shakes the tin of her world, and chooses to make the best of where things have landed, sometimes I do too.
The Mutual Admiration Society
Show me the audacious and the new. Some artists work well as hermits, removing connection with normality so that they can bury themselves in a pure kind of making. That’s the Van Gogh cut-your-ear-off kind of artist life that wouldn’t be useful for my family, or actually for my own mental health. Instead, I’m really pretty happy when my work lets me encounter the brilliance of other people, and dwell for a time in their particular passions.
Advance and Retreat
Returning to this idea about work and play. I’m accepting that I might never make any money from my urge to pursue ‘art’, whatever that actually means. In the post-study aftermath, I am piecing together the ways that we can fund our life. One of the main ways I can do that is with my photography, and I have never been more grateful to have this ability to merge my obsession and our need.
A Lion in the Meadow
When I was a child, I’m told, I had an invisible friend I called ‘Geoffrey Lion’. I have no memory now about what Geoffrey looked like, but it might have been an early indication of my particularly vivid imagination.
Photographer in theory, if not practice.
I’m reflecting that this creative life has definite seasons and rhythms, and this week is part of that. I think there is a perpetual element of dissatisfaction for photographers - we think and plan and collect before we can actually do the exciting bit.