It has been almost two years since the last post. COVID took a pretty heavy toll on going out to take street photographs, and it has been difficult to summon up enthusiasm to post new content. This post is an attempt to bootstrap the blog-writing process again.

The intervening time has seen many changes. Aside from the pandemic, there is the continuing fall out from Brexit with its catastrophic economic, social and political effects, the war in Ukraine which impacts and threatens everyone, and the continuous unfolding disaster that is anthropic climate change.

All three crises are eminently solvable, but are not. In no small part this is thanks to a common underlying problem – namely the exploitation of nationalism and populism for power and wealth. This is a depressingly successful strategy that exploits artificial ‘culture wars‘, unspoken prejudices, and more generally, humanity’s failure to culturally and socially evolve to exist in a world with eight billion people all connected in near real-time by modern technology.

Part of this problem is the difficulty in comprehending the current scale of human activity. By some estimates there are approximately 57000 photographs taken every second of the day – a staggering number which results from the combination of vast population size and the wide spread adoption of smart phones.

With such an unfathomable torrent of visual information it has become increasingly difficult to find well curated photography, and good contributions that people try to make are all too often simply lost in the noise.

This is a time in which newspapers are frequently replacing their few remaining professional photographers and journalists with freelancers and often little more else than regurgitated press-releases, publicity material and ‘user-generated’ content. An example is National Geographic, which recently announced that it was ceasing its print publication and is laying off all remaining staff writers.

Instead, we now have the uncontrolled algorithmic firehoses of Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and their like, whose only priority is to capture moments of attention that can be harvested for money. In this world, rational discourse and artistic experimentation are lost under a flood of celebrity scandals and divisive politics, all undercut by cheering, hating and frequently mundane and meaningless content from the billions of people who are being economically farmed.

In this context, why even try to write blog posts such as this? For me personally, I think that it helps codify thinking, both visually and conceptually. Simply trying to construct a short post with a coherent visual narrative is a useful exercise in itself.

But to a potential reader, perhaps this is just all more noise, in which case I apologise in advance.

There is also a sense that blogging feels like an act of resistance against the Elon Musks and the Steve Huffmans of this world. Here, I can control the platform, and have actively refused both advertising or sponsored content. Of course, this makes not one jot of difference to the world at large.

Going forward, I am aiming to post something monthly. My photography has changed a lot over the last two years, moving away from street and situational work towards a more measured and a slower style, although still following a trend of longer thematic projects. This does not mean no street photography, but it does imply a different way or working.

Concurrent with this is also a move away from film – which has become scarily difficult to source, expensive, and which is increasingly difficult to travel with due to new, higher power airport security scanners. In its place is digital medium format, of which I will probably say more in the future.