On photography (or lack thereof)
I have sort of completely stopped taking photographs.
It's been a gradual process, punctuated by the odd short bursts of images (for example, when I went to London last month) but beyond that the camera has been sitting quietly on the shelf, not exactly gathering dust (I keep my office clean) but certainly slowly draining the battery. I rather impulsively bought a lens last week (this one) hoping it might spark some more enthusiasm but to be honest, it's probably going to sit on the shelf too. And it's not even arrived yet, it's still somewhere in China waiting to be loaded onto a boat.
I'd cancel the purchase but I can't be arsed. I'll wait till it gets here, and, who knows, it might reignite something.
Photography, like music and baseball, suffers from the fact that there is so much of it. You're swamped with Instagram, Foto, Threads now too, even Bear has it's fair share of photographers. And they're all really good, and I'm just soooo average. And everything has been done already. Even the YouTubers I used to follow are regurgitating the same old tropes - people walking into or out of shadows, images taken through windows, close-up portraits, endless gear reviews, and Leica fetishists, to name but a few.
There are some honourable exceptions. Willem Verbeeck, James Popsys, PaulieB, and Kyle McDougall to name just a few. There are others. But also worth mentioning is Dante Sisofo who, like Erik Kim, another legend of early YouTube street photography, went off the rails a bit with extreme diets and those strange shoes that look like gloves, but who seems to be back doing really pure, honest photography. His early work in and around Baltimore was just excellent, and the stuff he did in the Middle East was superb. He seems to have taken it all down though, which is a shame. But there's still plenty of good stuff to see.
But, sure, look - it's not them. It's me. I've just fallen out of love with photography. I'm hoping it'll come back (Dante Sisofo has a Flux 7-Day Challenge that I might try), but if it doesn't, that's fine too. I've thought about selling the camera and getting one of these instead but part of me thinks I'll regret it. All the flesh is gone, but the bones remain, to quote from one of my favourite Wedding Present songs.
I like the stuff over at my photography page, a collection of my own personal favourite images, and a wee blog, and which may well end up becoming my photography gravestone.
Who knows.