Several months ago I wrote about the creative benefits of having one’s own website. Even if no one knows about it, or if no one visits it, it is still a very beneficial thing to have. If you are in any way interested in improving your photography, or in trying to develop a sense of your own aesthetic style, then a website will help you with that.
I like to think of my website as my garden, and it is my garden for one reason: it is a place where I can plant conceptual ideas, or arrange my images in different formats. It is a place where I watch my ideas grow.
Personal websites tend to have a life of their own, and I find that I am always tending mine. My website has become instructive in helping me sort out what works and what doesn’t, and also in instructing me as to where my current work is leading me.
For the past year or so, I’ve been feeling as though I was in a wilderness. Since covid hit, the website became very static. I started to feel it represented this feeling. It was telling me : ‘you are stuck’.
It was telling me the truth, and I knew it.
I couldn’t go anywhere, and I couldn’t produce any new work. That feeling continued even when I began to go back to running tours and workshops, and my website confirmed it to me. I could see it in the layout of the work presented there.
It told me that I was (and still am) needing to go find some new places. It showed me that it is time to find other places. All I can tell you right now, is that I am working hard in the background at forging new plans. But it will take time. Covid didn’t just halt things. I have felt that things have been going backwards, ‘world view’ speaking.
Regardless of my personal plight, and insights as to where we are now. The fact is, that my website wasn’t lying to me. It was telling me something and I knew it.
In the meantime, I went through several iterations feeling unhappy, and knowing why that was so.
However, in the past months, I’ve begun to feel that I’ve turned a corner. By re-organising the front page, I noticed there was more of a cohesive theme between the portfolios than I had first assumed. What had first felt like a bunch of loose ends cobbled together after covid, was now showing me that underneath it all, the work was moving more towards a conceptual, abstract look.
I often feel that it takes a while for the conscious mind to catch up with where our artistic leanings are taking us.
Tending my garden showed me I was actually moving forward. I doubt if anything else could have done so.
I don’t quite know what’s changed, but I am of the opinion that unlike the saying ‘calm before the storm’, there tends to be chaos in one’s own work before it all starts to feel like it is making sense. The loose ends, feeling a bit stuck. All of that is normal creative chaos.
It is only since re-organising that I now see that what I felt were loose ends were actually all aesthetically bound together: the work is more abstract than it once was. I am more sure now, that I’m more interested in anonymous locations than the ‘honey pot’ spots. I’m also more aware that I’ve been moving towards fine tuning how I convey the places I have come to know so well over the past several years. This last point in case, I think is illustrated well by the six images above. They are not a radical departure from what I’ve created before, but I do think the concept is perhaps more focussed. Again, this could only have happened by tending my garden.
So you see, I think having one’s own website, one’s own garden as it were, to explore one’s own growth is important. I know for me, it has been so for a very long time.
Postscript: the above images will feature in this month’s coming newsletter about portfolio development.