A kick in the pants
Over recent years, most of the ‘stuff’ I do (outside of work) has skewed towards the mediums of photography and video. Early in my career, I was a magazine art director, and there’s always been a photographer inside me that was determined to get out. How talented that photographer is, I’ll leave for others to judge, but I enjoy that it’s an art form that doesn’t require critique.
I don’t have a driving desire for other folks to see my video and photography work (but here’s a link anyhow) and give me an attaboy, and importantly, I dont need to rely on anyone else to get things done. Nobody ever stops you from putting a camera or a drone into the car and pointing that car in the vicinity of nowhere to see what you find.
If the car points you toward my beloved Mallee country, in Victoria’s north west, then there’s a hell of a lot to see and you won’t get bored. I promise you that.
My approach to photography is that it’s primarily a way of thinking — a meta-assessment of what is, and what that could be. Sure, there are arguments in it that I am making, but these positions aren’t made in words. It’s learned, like all technical skills, but at a certain point when I’m creating photographs, I’m not thinking in words. If there were to be a word, it would simply be ‘behold!’
All of this is to say that I have not been writing much, and that this has been the case for some years years. Perdition catch my soul, but I do miss it so.
Today, while I was ingesting stuff online rather than making something, I saw that the internet’s own Merlin Mann posted a link to his Wisdom Project — a corpus of insight and observation about life, the world, and ways to approach both. It’s very good, and you should read it immediately.
One of the entries jumed right out at me today.
“Write at least a paragraph a day. Of something”
Photography is a way of thinking, sure. But it is not, for me the same as the act of thinking. Nothing puts the mind at forefront so much as do the creation and arrangement of words. And to me there can be no argument against the idea that a skill not exercised goes eventually fallow. My writing used to dance on the page where now it lumbers. I had a skill, and to my detriment I let it go to seed.
These have been some meandering paragraphs. But they are paragraphs of something. I am preparing to hit ‘publish’.
And I mean to do it over and over again.