Personal photography
One of the things that I’ve been thinking about for a long time is: what will happen to my photos once I’m gone? I’m not talking about whether the actual images will still exist (hint: print). I’m talking about what will people do with them.
Warning: this is photography-adjacent only.
Sometimes I buy second hand books. Either on Amazon or on local markets. Mostly because when you buy a lot of books it becomes expensive. Especially photography books. And I need the money for photography and astronomy. On occasion, these books come from libraries that have closed or that have sold some of their stock of rarely borrowed books to replace them with books people prefer.
I love when these books still contain their date stamped lending cards.
I’m still trying to identify why I like Substack so much more than other social platforms. So navel gazing warning is in place.
One of the things that annoyed me with Substack is the fact that the various people writing on it do so for duplicates of themselves.
I’m not a street photographer. Part of it is that I live in the middle of nowhere and we don’t really have streets. I was in Paris at the weekend to visit my parents, so I experimented a bit.
Sometimes, photography reminds me of scientific research. Both disciplines demand an intense focus on minute details, adhering to conventions that outsiders rarely understand, communicating in a formalized way, and both often seem incomprehensible to the general public.
During my last visit in Paris, I went to a Richard Avedon exhibition at the Cartier-Bresson Foundation.
In our modern world of unlimited cloud storage and high-capacity hard drives, the practice of printing photographs might seem antiquated. Yet, this traditional approach to preserving memories remains not just relevant but crucial, particularly when considering the long-term preservation of our visual heritage.
Sometimes people call me pedantic because I insist on defining things precisely. I don’t do it for pleasure. I do it because it’s important and it helps understand things.
I hate photography challenges. They just don’t work for me. But I also desperately want to take part.
Over the years, I have developed what I call my photographic style. It doesn’t mean my photos are good, just that I found what pleases me and what works for me. And that’s what I do. I don’t do this professionally, not even creatively, so I don’t feel the pressure to be different.
