The Fountain

Coin fountain, American Wing - Metropolitan Museum of Art

The photoblog is a kind of anti-darkroom. It trivializes everything. Because you are, after all, just a small newspaper. And you know what newspapers are used for.

But the photoblog does take on a life of its own. Feed me! Feed me! It devours images. Like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. It always wants more.

But what is it - really? Marketing device? Grown-up "show and tell." Community networking? Desire to become known, or admired, or hated?

To answer that - I have to go back about six or seven years when I started the "journal" on line. My original idea was that it would be interesting for people to read - day by day - what the photography process was like for one photographer. But I also realized, from day one, that if you didn't have something to keep people coming back - they'd look at a couple of pictures and you'd never see them again because you just can't keep posting new pictures fast enough but you can make up or write something everyday. How interesting it will be - that's the challenge.

I had always kept a journal anyway - so this would be the same, just doing it online.

No. No. No.

It didn't work out that way because I ran out of things to say about photography (like now) so I just started writing about anything. I wrote poems. Dreams. Made up short pieces of fiction. Because I could write about anything that didn't involve anyone else who might be embarrassed by what I wrote. Not to mention that I can't even write everything about myself without being embarrassed. I did try though. I think the low-point might have been when I told that I wear a partial bridge - four front teeth - and that I walked out of the house without it and got all the way onto the subway before I realized...

But where is the line. You walk a tightrope. What are the rules.

My mother died 17 years ago. Once a year I go with my father to visit her gravesite. We went a few days ago. I took pictures of her gravestone, and of my father standing near his own empty plot. He's 82 years old and well aware of his next stop. It's an important picture. But --

Where is the public / private line?

That's the difference between a public blog and a private journal.

The blogger is the tightrope walker. Ladies and Gentlemen - watch the photographer try to walk the tightrope. But there are many tightropes for him to traverse.

The line that can or can't be crossed in the blog.

Artistic wanderings. Some go nowhere. Others - very few - show results. Photography is mostly about botched attempts and misguided ideas. That's why they make the advance lever and rapid fire...

You publish your own newspaper column - but where has your editor gone?

It's all a tightrope. Below, if you look down, you'll see: commerical failure; self-doubt; mediocrity. The trick - don't look down.