Five Years of Photoblogging

Five years ago today I launched the Monday Morning Photo Blog with the following image:

My original intention was to use the photo blog as a venue for some of my old photographs from the 1990s (and in a few cases, the 1980s) that were otherwise just sitting in boxes collecting dust. After all, what a photograph loves most is eyeballs. I figured the photoblog might run for about a year.

As it turns out, my archive of prints and negatives ran deeper than I had expected. Five years later it’s still running, although these days I am more likely to include new images than old ones. However, I’m really glad to have found a place to show some of those old photographs. My only regret is that a tiny scanned image on the screen is no comparison with an actual black & white print. I’m an obsessive printer, assiduously massaging light and shadow and contrast, printing over and over again just to get it right, and choosing photographic paper for it’s tonality and texture. All of that is lost when the photograph is shown on a computer screen.

Over the five years of the Monday Morning Photo Blog I’ve occasionally messed up. A couple of times I’ve accidentally posted a duplicate, forgetting that I had already used the image some months (or years) earlier. There are also a few images that I regret posting because they simply aren’t up to standard, but my rule is “once it’s up, it’s up.” (I occasionally tweak images, but I never remove them.)

I have no idea how much longer I’ll keep at it. My stock of unshown yet worthwhile older images has dwindled (although I always find new ones when I go poking around), and I feel like much of the new photography I’m doing is little more than Flickry snapshots. (I always strive for narrative, not just aesthetics in the images I post to the photoblog. Not that I frequently achieve either, but I keep trying…)

I have no immediate plans to stop, nor do I have specific plans to continue. It’s a zen-like activity that will stop on its own, when the time is right.