Digital Fall
A straightforward photography post
As time accelerates with aging, the seasons come to almost resemble times of the day. Wasn’t it just early afternoon/midsummer, and now it’s somehow evening/fall? Of course since I first drafted this post we’ve already moved into night/winter.
It is somewhat of a problem of the format that I have to always write something to go along with the photography. (Though who tells me so? I came up with the format after all. I could just post pictures, but it feels like I should also write a context for them.)
Artists usually only have to present the work itself, and maybe a statement to go along with the work and is rarely read. Not that I necessarily claim what I do here is similar to an artist hanging up work in a gallery; it is not quite that, even though this blog is visuals-forward and where I publish what I consider my own favorite pictures that I’ve taken.
Since I lead this blog by photography, the writing, in this context, comes second. The photography is the outcome of walks; then I write up the account of the walk or of the photography, both of which are however already also expressed by the images themselves. That’s the small paradox of the endeavor.
My writing writing I do in other settings, those of simply writing, focusing on other kinds of word constructions, essays, fiction and poetry. Likewise my more random, daily photography I do elsewhere, on Twitter and Instagram, where I just post whatever phone photos without thinking too much about how to curate or arrange them (at least beyond the post itself and general aesthetic considerations).
I could curate more carefully, here and in social media, but don’t want to do so. Here I curate based on individual walks, for the most part, rather than through a project-based approach. I just find that more appealing for something like this, which is not as ephemeral as social media, not quite the statement of a gallery show either, but something more related and linked to everyday life, a practice. I probably should have still another avenue for photography, a website or occasional photo books or collected sets of prints, for example, wherein to publish more focused projects. Something to consider for the coming year.
For this post, the context for the photos below is going to be this kind of meta-context instead of a walk narrative, as this reflects this post’s nature as a walk in between project updates (the photos really are just a random morning walk I took, but I like them nonetheless).
I have several more installments in the City in the Trees series coming up (I spent several more weeks working on it), which is probably why I’m thinking about form, walks vs projects, the endless openness of the newsletter itself as a format. Could/should I also include my fiction writing, essays (I’m writing one on the use of variation in Schumann’s music), translations of Finnish literature? Or should there be a separate avenue for those? (You can sound off in the comments; my preliminary notion is to start including more material here next year, while also submitting more to other journals. Here is a recent set of translations published elsewhere, for example.)
In other news, it’s December, so Sept-Dec subscriber prints are about to go into production and then start shipping your way, in time for the holidays. If your address has changed or you’re a new subscriber, please feel free to share a shipping address at yokaihainen(at)gmail.com.
In any case, I present the fall walk. I went outside with my Olympus EPM2, thinking I would have several mornings of this kind to document the fall. I didn’t; this happened to be the very peak of the leaves. Soon after the Boston winter wind that seems constant through the whole season had already taken them.
