Reason enough

This blog went quiet a few years ago. Not by decision though, my working life changed, and the practice of choosing photographs, placing words next to them, and putting them here just stopped happening, without me ever deciding to stop.

Photography and writing itself didn’t disappear, but they stopped being public. I kept photographing on occasions, and I kept writing, mostly in a diary, where nothing needs to be selected or explained or shown to anyone. What I only realized, writing this and reading Natalie Goldberg ‘Schrijven vanuit je hart’ (Writing down the bones) and Anne Lamot ‘Bird by bird‘, is that I had never really written (in public) before either. I described photography projects occasionally. That isn’t the same as writing as a practice.

Looking back at these quiet years, the number of projects I actually started or finished dropped, and with it came a feeling of not producing anything, not contributing anything. There were fewer people to make happy with a photograph, and fewer of my own happy moments too, the kind that come from experiencing something new and from reflecting on what I’d made. The writing didn’t move anywhere either. It stayed inside my own thoughts and never had to test itself against anyone else’s.

What I’m longing for isn’t merely output, though it does stimulate. It’s the practice itself, the state of close observation and creation that pulls me toward something outside my own head. It’s the chance to open doors that wouldn’t otherwise be visible or open, to meet people and situations I wouldn’t meet without a reason to go looking. And it’s connection, some sense of belonging to people who photograph and write and make things, instead of consuming only and doing all of it alone.

I’ve been waiting to feel ready before starting again. In practice, everything is already in place. There’s nothing left to prepare. But there’s a nagging feeling of uselessness in putting work into the open without an audience, without an email list or people who might comment, without any of the exposure that’s supposed to justify doing this publicly at all. Some part of me still wants a first purpose, a finished body of work, a professional reason, something with a return on it. I know that isn’t a reasonable thing to wait for.