Unfinished work
Staying true to the process and allowing it to lead us through
“I have written a lot lately.”
Mostly true.
Perhaps better said: “I have written a lot that is not yet finished.”
I have taken to writing by hand in pads the things that come to my mind. I regularly fill a few pages before an idea comes to a stopping point. On the page following these, a new idea begins and trucks along until something distracts me enough to stop me. And this pattern continues through the writing pad in various colours of ink, thicknesses and levels of steadiness of hand. The topics of late range over far more than musings about the still images of photography — the subject which created this blog.
The last few months have been incredibly slim in terms of everyday image-making, though. I have been committing my daytime hours to something else. I have been advancing my skills in German, and that has left precious little time for the click of the shutter. My brain has hardly been overwhelmed — more thoughts than ever seem to be pouring out of it. The only “problem” it seems is that I haven’t managed to make them whole.
I think back. A previous version of me, calling himself a blogger of sorts, he would always set out to write something and finish it in time for dinner. Was he more creative? Less inhibited? More determined? Or, less intentional? Less discerning? More careless? More angry?
I don’t know.
I am not sure if I should care, but I still wonder.
Working on paper slows things down.
It’s in my notebooks and writing pads that I give myself permission to write.
Sometimes it feels that starting a new draft digitally means I am already giving my words away; long before I’m ready. It’s almost like that action somehow tricks me into feeling I am committing to share a thread which is not yet fully pulled and explored and processed.
The knowledge that my words can lie safely on those pages and nowhere else enables me to hold onto them for just a little while longer.
It’s also easier for me to be honest without the spectre of publication looming on the horizon. I can just decide later if what I’ve done warrants the value of publishing. What is made, gets made; for the purpose of making it.
This process is not unlike my photographic one. In that practice, I produce the majority of my images on film, and the soonest I can review them comes days, sometimes weeks, later. Like writing on paper, there is an extra step required for digitalisation, and yet more steps of finishing required to bring the images to the world.
All along the way, I make decisions about the suitability of an image. Perhaps it is for me, or maybe it’s for others. But I make the image first and foremost, and then I finish it later. I develop, I edit, I curate, I cull; sometimes, I publish.
The process itself filters the results. If I don’t hold back with the camera — why should I do the same with my writing?
…or anything else?
Thanks for reading and viewing The Full Frame. ■
i have too many unfinished drafts too...
I was reading this one and kept thinking that street photos are the same stories, but less annotated. Maybe they allow to capture the feeling without having to need to find the words, and they are generous enough for our stories to stay vague, allowing multiple readings.