… first day of November… the toboggan run down the hill to Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year has begun…
… yesterday i was feeling a little frustrated that i am not making any progress on my photography work… i have no projects in progress, or so i was thinking, other than cleaning up my archive, processing photographs i haven’t processed, etc… i keep thinking i should be trying to make a book… i should be submitting to calls for entry… i should be planning what my next solo show will be… i should be doing what the world of fine art photography expects me to do… i have been telling myself that the new year will be a year in which i actively return to doing all of these things…
… at the same time, i have been questioning my participation in what Jörg Colberg and others call “photoland”… something doesn’t feel right about it… as Colberg points out, it is a self-contained and incestuous land… photographers, gallerists and the wealthy having a limited conversation of limited value and importance… and that conversation has a limited set of formats in which it can be conducted… and the economics of it is a false economics… a photograph is infinitely reproducible… and yet, artists and gallerists rely on artificially limiting the product to make it valuable and then sell that exclusivity to the well-enough off-to-afford-it… it’s an elitist system… something’s not right…
… for some time i have been frustrated by the artificial limitations of format that photoland places on photographic artists… for a long time i have been working on a project that has been through a number of iterations of title, but in the end is the same project… going for daily walks and photographing what catches my attention… whatever it is… i write about what i see and experience too…
… this project demands a daily display of photographs that are “of the moment”… it needs an extended format of ongoing presentation…
… it finally struck me yesterday that I have been working!… daily… for a long time… and this is what i have been working on… this is the project!…
… the current iteration of the project is this blog, Notes On Attention Paid (NOAP)
… i must continue to refine it… articulate what i am doing… come up with an artists statement… come up with a way to connect it to photoland without allowing photoland to artificially constrain it…
… this will be the work of the new year…