After I left the world of full-time employment I had a lot of time on my hands and I realised that I needed a strategy to deal with that. Having read a bit and thought a bit I decided to chunk that time into four areas of activity which were: earning some money; pursuing the spiritual; charitable volunteering; and having fun. I stuck to these for quite a while and each New Year I would devise some short-term and some longer-term points of reference within these activities so that I could plot my course. I wouldn’t call them goals because I am not a great fan of goals: direction I like, but goals I avoid. I just prefer to maintain a general tack.
After about a decade or so I dropped this system because I was more confident about where I was going and what I was doing. More recently I’ve found myself in need of some sort of a framework again for my creative activities. In fact, this blog is part of that because it helps me reflect on what I’m doing both in writing and in photography.
Then last January I set up a few resolutions to navigate my way creatively through the year. These were mostly courses: an online course in modern architecture (which got cancelled); some bookmaking tuition which I will have completed by the end of January 2020; and some darkroom work - which I did in March. I may rebook the architecture course but I can’t help thinking that courses, while helpful in their way, can easily become a distraction. So how can I plot a line through 2020?
Well, perhaps I have been a little adrift photographically since making the move over the Pennines to Manchester. Photographing whatever happens to float across your lens is a reasonable day to day strategy - for an amateur anyway - but it’s also good to have something longer term in the background. My new cataloguing system is helping (see Blogpost 25 October) but I am devising at least one self-contained photographic project which I intend will bear some sort of fruit before the end of the year. Obviously, my lips must remain sealed because the more you talk about these things the less you do anything about them.
Secondly, browsing through this year’s crop of photographs, I realise that I must exercise more control technically. Swapping from digital to film is not for the fainthearted. Digital cameras flatter you enormously but a simple film camera lays bare your technical shortcomings mercilessly. A significant weak point for me has been in the development of negatives. You send them away to a lab and you have no idea what chemicals they are to be steeped in. This affects overall results because the development of the negative is critical to image quality. To the barricades then! I will develop my negatives at home because that is the only way to control that bit of the process. Printing is another matter but I’ll stick to scanning and digital printing for the moment.
And what of Words + Photos? This seems to have emerged as a major blog theme over 2019. I keep turning it over in my mind and am going to try this year to put together some short text and images in a way that satisfies me at least. This will be in handmade book form.
In order to maintain quality in the text I will be submitting haiku to various journals as well. I’ve had longer form prose published in the past but haiku are a completely different discipline. I’ve written lot of them over the years yet have never sent any for publication. Looking back at them now, that may not have been a bad thing. A long apprenticeship presumably makes for a better craftsman.
So that should see me through 2020 quite safely. As should this blog, too, of course.
Here’s a photo to end the year with.
I’ve heard it said that all words are metaphors in the sense that they stand in for reality. I suppose the same might be said of photographs. So here you get two metaphors for the price of one. Or maybe a photograph of a word is a double metaphor? This was a rather beautiful gravestone which I chanced across when visiting the ex-cotton town of Rochdale - which just happens to be my birthplace.