My blog is dying a death, I recently said to a friend. She was concerned; I wasn't. She jumped to metrics, engagement, and all things I didn't understand. Maybe she didn't realize that all I meant was that I had stopped posting.
The rise of AI hasn't killed my desire to make images, it just made 'visually competent' images dead overnight. It exposed a truth: I had been stuck in a trap of creating work for an audience, not myself, not the work I really wanted to make. My blog had become a paradox. All my thinking about photography led to a single realisation - performative photography had become the shipwreck. To go silent became an active choice.
Letting my blog die a little death became a necessity. There are periods when the outward act of photography must stop so the pressure of art can incubate. Stripped of an audience and free from the demand to produce for others, the practice changes. Asking yourself, "What is the work I actually want to create?" requires an inward look - a process almost incompatible with today’s hyper-connected culture.
Standing alone, armed with nothing but a camera and a desire to create deeply personal images, is as paralysing as it is revealing. I have no interest in making merely "pretty" images, yet I found myself trapped in a cage of my own design. Throughout my blog, I had leaned heavily into the cerebral: art as intellect. I felt compelled to make work that justified an academic narrative. The unsettling truth that eventually took hold was that I didn't love those images either. Robert Adams once noted regarding John Szarkowski's writing on photography that the viewer doesn't just want the seeds of the apple; they demand the succulent flesh as well. Theory alone is not enough - the sensory, living core of the work must be there.
I have been away for months, lost in deeply productive thought about my work. You might be looking for a neat conclusion, but I have none. The academic framework behind my practice has solidified, and I know the path I want to take. Yet the images themselves remain an enigma. Sometimes you simply have to trust the process, step forward, and allow the work to evolve into what it needs to be. Art, after all, is a journey.
