21 June 2012

I'm 67 days into my year of daily photographs (see also here), which is not especially far when you're aiming for 365. But it's been interesting in that it forces me to look at my own photographs, and also sometimes to take photographs I don't really like at all and send them out into the wilds of the internet. It reminds me, in some ways, of how my endless revisions of my thesis proposal are forcing me to look at all the individual sentences in a way I don't, normally (I'll admit: in my 17 years of formal education I never really learned to revise), and the whole thing expands before me like a fractal; with the idea of the whole reflected in the ideas presented in individual sentences. Ideally. I'm not really there, yet, but I think that's where we're going.

So taking pictures every day is sort of like writing the same paper repeatedly for two years (which is basically what writing a thesis is), and also not at all. Mostly I wanted an excuse to link to these photographs from Rebecca Norris Webb's book 'My Dakota', but my segue turned rather graceless, there. Regardless, looking at these images pushed at something in me, because these are photographs of the prairie, and the prairie is where I am, part of what I've been photographing. Webb has got it distilled to an essence perfect and strange.

1 comment:

A. B. Goss said...

I guess I'm the only person I know who's a natural editor. I rewrite during the rough draft. I'll do the same paragraph over three or four times before moving on to the next one. When I had the energy I did alternative versions of personal letters. I even used to do drafts for those stupid answer the questions on page 263 assignments for school. The only things that don't get worked over are these blog comments.