A little over four years ago I started this blog with no better plan other than I wanted to do a “Covid Project,” and I began by writing a post where I begged for a bigger camera:
I want a camera that tells me if what I am shooting is good or bad, whether the idea is dumb, tells me whether it’s been done before. I want a camera that takes away the slogging through thousands of images, a never-sleeping assistant that shows me winners and doesn’t waste my time with all the rest. I want a camera that does all the stuff for me that I don’t want to do, that can anticipate my choices, that pushes me higher. If my camera was bigger I could do more, do it better, think about it more clearly, be happier when I am doing it and be more satisfied when I am done.
Little did I realize then that, a few years later, at the time I was writing this, in late August 2024, that bigger camera isn’t so much a statement of the challenges of making art as it is a legitimate business plan for AI-enabled app makers.
Things change, oh boy do they.
Looking back over my nearly two hundred posts I see both a diary and an evolution, I see a record of a time in my life, told through book reviews, travel posts, commentary on equipment, and photo projects that I was working on, often in a chronological order than differs greatly from my memory of the sequence.
What do other people see in the blog? I know the gear stuff has proven popular, though most of those posts spiked and then quickly dropped back down, the readers of gear reviews not so much interested in my other posts. Book reviews have proven even more popular and these readers look around a bit, you can see it in the numbers.
One interesting way to see what others see in this blog is to look at the top posts, say the top ten, in keeping with internet listicle tradition. And here they are:
1) Cahokia: The Bodies at Mound 72 (November 12, 2020) is the post that just doesn’t stop. Some posts have a large spike when I first post and then drop off over time. Cahokia never had any sort of spike at all but has had a steady readership since I published it. No doubt the idea of buried bodies attracts attention far beyond art photography’s tiny circle of readers.
2) Book Review: How He Became Ansel Adams—A Review of Senf’s Making a Photographer (Part One) (October 10, 2020). This one had a big spike which has never really faded away. The first of two parts ruminates on Rebecca’s Senf excellent bio of the early Ansel Adams, as he was first forming his ideas of who he was as a photographer and who we were as an audience, and the interactions of the two.
3) Book Review: Looking at On Photographs, by David Campany (January 18, 2021). An example of Campany’s prodigious output—he seems to write a book, a forward, an essay every day of the week, fifty-two weeks a year—and the review is like many of my reviews, anything but a sales pitch for or against a book but rather charting my reactions to a book, digressions and all.
4) Was Ansel Adams a Landscape Photographer? (October 10, 2020). Published immediately after my two-part review of Senf’s book (see #2, above) this essay points out that Ansel did not think of himself as a “landscape photographer” and the books he published were not (up until he hired a business manager in the 1970s) made up predominately of landscape images. But we don’t want him to be anything other than a landscape photographer, I suppose, alas.
5) Book Review: Welcome to the Jungle—Maya Ruins Revisited, by William Frej (February 8, 2021). Every once in a while you come across a photobook from a photographer you’ve never heard of that just blows your mind. This one, a non-rephotography rephotograph project looking at Mayan ruins through the images of Teobert Maler and Frej’s own, did it for me. I started reading everything I could about the Mayan ruins and the possibility of traveling there once the pandemic was over. I still want to go.
6) Book Review: Rituals In the Snow—A review of Zaido by Yukari Chikura (March 9, 2021). One of my favorite photobooks (I bought several as Christmas gifts), it is a book made like a crafted artist book despite being published by a mainstream photobook publisher. In my review, I cast off any attempt to write about the book with a sort of God’s-eye-view and just journaled my reactions in real-time, a method I’ve adopted to one degree or another in many subsequent reviews.
7) Book Review: Photographers Looking at Photographers—and Writing About Them (March 22, 2021). Alas, Pier 24, a wonderful-in-many-ways photography space in San Francisco is set to close in a few months, the foundation that funds the space now changing its philanthropic focus. Though they have put out books that documented every exhibition, this book, modeled on Szarkowski’s landmark Looking at Photographs, will probably be the book that defines Pier 24 for those who weren’t able to visit.
8) Justin Remes On Movies that Don’t Move (March 1, 2021). Remes’s guest posts on a topic that seems at first contradictory—movies that have little to no movement. Remes is a professor at Iowa State University, knows a thing or two about these sorts of films, and shares a list of samples from this subgenre to get the reader started on montionless movies.
9) Creative Destruction of the Creatives (April 18, 2023). Most of the posts on this list were published earlier in my blog’s history and have the advantage of time to register their popularity. This post, its title riffing off a famous phrase by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (my economics training is showing through a little here), is a lament for human creativity, published soon after the image-making AI programs made their debut.
10) Listicle: Top 7 College Photo Textbooks (January 27, 2021). How fitting to finish off this listicle of top articles on my blog with another listicle. This post marvels at the degree to which the syllabi of college photo courses—not economics courses, not sociology courses, not political science courses, but photo courses—include works by Marx or authors sympathetic to Marx in their syllabi’s assigned textbooks.
