Being 42

Thursday 16th July 2015, 6.25am (day 1,421)

I have been re-reading Gerry Badger’s superb book, The Genius of Photography, a fascinating history of the medium. Last time I did this I went all social realist on this blog and decided I was taking away these commentaries and letting the images speak for themselves. This lasted about a week after I received a surprising number of complaints both directly and indirectly. So don’t worry, I’m not going to do that again.

But Badger’s book does always make me ask, just why am I doing this? What is it I’m trying to create? Is it art? Am I making a statement about the world? I think the answer has to be no, I’m not an artist. But what I am is a blogger, a diarist: I’ve kept a journal for over thirty years now (yes, every day), and this blog has become an extension of it into the visual medium, and also a public medium. I hope I create pictures that are aesthetically pleasing along the way — a body of photographic work if you like, after all, I take so many that some of them are going to be half decent. But just as important is the accumulated narrative. This blog depicts the world as I see it each day, no more, no less. No photos are posed or staged, and all light is what I have to work with on the spot. And that’s what I do.

I doubt it’ll make much impact on the history of photography or be noticed by Gerry Badger should he ever write a second edition of his book, but it gives me a sense of my own place in the world, and that’s what gives it value.