Blog, Version 2.0
White Trees, Series 2, No. 10
From roughly 2012 to 2020, I had a photography website with a blog. I added posts to the blog at least monthly, with each post having a new image and some thoughts about a related photography topic. The website was built in late 2012 by me using Wordpress, which is great for creating websites and blogs and is by no means excessively complicated to use, but requires just enough technical know-how so as to be a little beyond the time I have available and the minimal admin skills required to keep a website going. Bit by bit, piece by piece, over time the website gradually lost functionality, until in 2020 or so, it gave up the ghost entirely and went dark.
Turns out I’ve really missed having a website and a blog, but maybe not for the reasons you might think. Probably the most popular reason for a photography website and a blog is marketing, in a good way – to reach out to people with your work and to have a way for people to reach out to you who connect with your work. That’s important, and definitely is an important reason for me too to have a website.
But what I missed most about having a website – and in particular having a blog on which I could post new work and talk about it a little – was that my work didn’t feel quite finished until I made it publicly available for people to see. It’s true, I could still do the fieldwork with my camera, I could still edit the images in the digital darkroom, and I could still make prints on paper that I could hold in my hands and consider the final iteration of the image. But by and large, nobody would see those images but me. And while I do get exhibited and published from time to time, really, only a small portion of my finished work gets this, and the audience for exhibitions and publications is limited to the duration and reach that those exhibitions and publications have anyway. Without the website and the blog, most of my finished work is seen by nobody but me.
The important point here is not that people are looking at my work (though of course I’m very happy when they do), but rather simply that my work is being made available to be looked at. There’s just something about crossing that line, from work that you think is done, to work that you’re going to go out and show the world. It’s kind of a “things just got real” moment when you realize the work is leaving your hands and has to stand up for itself in the world. It subtly changes the way you look at it, knowing that once you put it out there, it rises or falls on its own merits. That’s when work really feels finished to me, when I have enough confidence in it that I can send it into the world and let it stake its own claim there.
So, I’m elated to have a new website and a new blog on which I can post new work. Certainly I hope the work connects with people, but if nothing else, I’m glad to have a blog again which I can use as a proving ground to myself for the work that I’m making. I think of it as my blog, version 2.0.
