I take a lot of photos but only ever share a small portion of them online. I don’t like the serial photo approach, a gallery of one photo after another, though it makes for a beautiful display. Perhaps this is because I’ve been posting my work from the beginning in a blog format, where each photo is picked to express a certain feeling/thought I am having at that moment. And since posts on blogs come in a serial way, in the sense of time, one after the other, over time, I’ve become very accustomed to sharing my photography in this way. It connects the photo to something more, a sequence, a different day, and what is going with my head and heart on the day that I post.
The subject of how the internet is used to show artwork has been on my mind a lot lately. There’s the “blanket the town with resumes” approach, which leaves me feeling run over. There’s the relentless self-promotion that seems to attach itself to posting anything you create, even if you don’t push it toward anyone you actually know or ever communicate with. There’s the kind of post that appears after you thought that perhaps the blog had become internet debris. There’s the news approach which follows a traditional periodical – as if the internet just absorbed a paper magazine electronically, with all its usual features and headlines, spotlights, etc etc. – and comes out mechanically at the same time, same day, same month and year, etc etc etc. I’ve explored all of these approaches to some degree or another during the time that I have been sharing my work on the internet. None of them really seems right for me.
So I am pondering these things, and by process of elimination, hopefully getting closer to a way of sharing that I can make peace with. A way to deal with the internet as a medium, as a new medium. Eliminate my experience of feeling perpetually uncomfortable in how I share. That is to say, allow myself to do so, but not get swept up in the approaches I’ve tried but which irritate me, though so many others feel at home with them. This way would be one which would allow me to share without pushing, without pressure, with depth, without feeling that a huge MOUNTAIN of my own data is about to crush me.
I’ve been having some rather radical ideas about that, but they’re still not quite ready to implement. Stay tuned…
Odilonvert 