2025-a non-review year in review
Eh. I think people love to do year end reviews. Looking back and seeing if I still like that picture I took in January, or remembering that cute portrait I took of the dogs can be fun and worthwhile to see if I have met goals or improved in the past year. (Or if I didn't, that's information, too.)
But it can also be cringey, embarrassing, or punishing if you have faced doubts or struggles, if you didn't meet your own expectations, or some dread if the coming year doesn’t hold the optimism that maybe you’d like it to. It can be a challenge to close the door on the previous year, and be open to the next.
This marks almost a year that I haven’t posted on Instagram. I have a lot of ick about Instagram, and I'd love to get rid of it completely, but there are too many people and organizations that I care about and want to follow. The year of not sharing on IG has marked a shift in how I think about sharing photography.
Instead of posting single images on social media, I’m thinking more about creating groups of images and writing about them, either for a blog post or a collection in the gallery. It’s still a work in progress. It seems easier to pair images together, but working with a bigger “portfolio” or “collection” is still a bit of a struggle. It's like the difference between planning a single concert and an entire season. One concert is easy to devise a theme, but an overarching season-long thread is a different animal.
I recognize that it is easier to think in terms of location rather than a specific piece of content like “these images go together because they all flow this direction.” Developing the skill of pairing or grouping seemingly disparate images into connected themes might be a lofty goal, I suppose. It is still easier to get images to “coagulate” in a group when they're paired by time and place. Returning to the symphonic season analogy, one could program works by the same composer and/or closely related composers, or one could aspire to program works that on first listen do not appear to have much in common, but ultimately pair like the perfect food and wine. (My favorite musical example of this is when conductor and Utah Symphony's Creative Partner David Robertson paired a choral piece by Anton Bruckner, Beethoven Symphony #9, and the third act of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck. Three great tastes that DO go great together! Quite possibly one of my favorite concerts of all time.)
These two images are a bit of a small exception. I would never have paired them, but they ended up on my phone next to one another and I liked how they looked. Not the same location, or week, but the same season. Almost like strange mirror images: colors in black, colors in white
But just because I haven't been posting photos on social media doesn't mean I haven't been doing photography. I took a couple (short) trips dedicated to photography, spent a few nights at Great Salt Lake, bought a couple new lenses, and tried some new things. (Oh yeah, and I learned that I won't shoot at 10 frames per second because I don't want to cull that many images!) I did a (short) online mentorship with Ray Hennesey, and I have so much more to learn.
So rather than pick “My Favorite” or “12 Best" or whatever, I went thru a couple of folders on my computer and went with “whatever stuck out to me in the moment I was looking.” The next time looking at the same folders might yield different choices, but these are the pictures I picked that day. Some may end up in future “collections,” some are already favorites, others are to be learned from. I'm not going to put them in any particular order either, they are just a random sampling. I'm really being a rebel. (And haha, joke's on me, I can't acutally re-order them on my tablet because squarespace sucks a little.)
Click to view larger, if you want to.
May your meadowlarks always sing, may there always be just enough water in your desert, and some stolen words: May you live like the lotus, at home in the muddy water.
