Did I mention I was a photographer?
It occurs to me that as my site traffic has grown, new readers won’t realize that I was a photographer. The past tense is intentional— though it’s sort of like saying I used to be a junkie. Once you’ve been swallowed-up by photography, it never really lets you go. For the last five or six years I’ve been seduced into becoming heterotextual.
I’ve been composing all manner of texts, excepting fiction. I approached photography much the same way, experimenting with everything except fabricated tableaus. Eventually, I’d like to be bimedial. That’s part of what this website has been about. Experimenting with combinations of words and images, just trying to see what I can make work. It think there is a synergy between text and image that is rarely explored, let alone exploited to full advantage. The only work that springs to mind that has integrated all the elements that obsess me: text, photographs, and found objects— is Bill Burke’s Mine Fields— but that’s a subject for another day.
Yesterday, I was looking at the gallery presentation I put together about a year ago. It’s right here, though few people bother to access it. Invisible Light, the online version, contains around a hundred images, available in a nice big slide show. I’ve noticed since I put it online that few people look at the big pictures. The thumbnail sketch is pathetic by comparison. I’m not sure if it’s a bandwidth issue or not, but I checked and it still works. That portion of the website was a lot of work. Posting an occasional photo to my blog isn’t. Please don’t email me with technical questions about infrared photography. All the questions gearheads might want answered are there on the main page under, surprisingly enough, hardware and technique.
The search module was put online today (though obviously there isn’t much to search here yet) and Professor Salo has generously given me some tips regarding MT templates that should speed the progress of getting the final design together. There’s a lot more stuff I want to play with here, but in case you think I’ve been sloughing off— I did manage to complete my reader’s notes to Literature in its Place today. I like stretching out like I did in that entry, giving myself the time to work things through. The book, in case you’re curious, is easily read in a day. However processing it into a form that another person might understand, well, that takes longer. But it’s rewarding to me, even if it’s only of use to a limited audience. That’s what I like most about the “new” look. It makes me want to be more concise— perhaps my biggest problem as a heterotextual. When those atoms start colliding, it often turns into an explosion.
