Photos / Blogs / Photoblogs

I am considering turning my blog into a photoblog. I have been using photos so much lately and am obsessed with using my camera in a way that is helping me think about the world...

Maybe `I will start a new blog in a new space and sort it out that way. (But in the meantime have to apparently wait 28 days for my camera to be returned from the camera hospital.)

I have decided my next article will look at the recording and sharing of perspectives on the banal, the boring and the everyday, as seen on Flickr. I am very excited about this and will be using deCerteau, Lefebrve, Joe Moran and others to help me. I have had a spending bonanza on Amazon. Here is what I have ordered to get me going ....

1 of: Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images
* 1 of: How Images Think
* 1 of: Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory
* 1 of: On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
* 1 of: Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction
* 1 of: Writings on Cities
* 1 of: The Production of Space
* 1 of: Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-imagined


Yep!! All of those. I'll let you know how I get on.



As synchronicity would have it (or maybe darned good Internet research) , I have found this new article in Media, Culture, Society By Kris Cohen. He writes:

Photobloggers like, most of all, to make photographs of what they call
‘the everyday’, the ‘banal’ or the ‘mundane’. These descriptors are a way
of emphasizing what their photographs are not about: they are not your
conventional holiday or Big Occasion snaps, not just about weddings and
birthdays. They’re not that kind of mundane. Instead, most photobloggers
say that ‘real life’ is the desired content of their photographs. They want
pictures of life as it happens, as they experience it. ‘Real life’, photo-
bloggers say, traditionally happens outside of photographs, and this is
precisely what they want in their photos.


So let's hope Kris Cohen has not said everything there is to say on this matter as I have thought about this a lot!!

Anyway, in the mean time you may like to check out the quality shots and some very interesting street photography on this site here. I think that DrKate would love the images of objects.

Finallly, Magnum does photography in a very different (journalistic) way of course and if you have five mins, I recommend this multi media essay by Jona Bendikson here. Journalists look fof the big events; the sensational. In this way they are different to the bloggers who wish to make much of the banal.