Looking Back, Looking Forward - Shades of Black and White

Well, it's the first day of 2015 and I have managed to keep this blog going for a whole year: cue fanfare of french horns and the ringing out of wild bells!

Back at the beginning of 2014 I set myself the task of establishing and maintaining a photo blog for twelve months, with postings every month or so. If you want the full details of my aims you can find them under the post on this blog impressively titled "Experimental Explanations and Projected Outcomes"

It turns out that my aim of having a more or less structureless project was overtaken by the monthly structure I had lurking at the back of the mind and so there were twelve posts, one for every month of the year. There were even several new poems written as a result, some of which have been published on this blog, some of which are biding their time elsewhere. I enjoyed taking the photographs and am very pleased with some of them, but as ever, some photographs I liked didn't make the cut because there wasn't enough space, or they didn't fit the theme, or they were taken in a past year.

Indeed, parallel to this blog, and at the tale end of 2014, I took the Facebook black and white photograph challenge and posted five black and white photos on my personal Facebook page. I was pleased with the result, but never featured the images here as they did not fit with the monthly cycle I had imposed on myself. I am therefore including the photos here now: shades of black and white from the freshly departed 2014.

The photographs were taken at different times of year, so they are an evocation of the year just gone in more ways than one.

But now, as has already been commented on, we are in 2015. I need to decide what to do with this blog and I want a photographic project for the year, if not longer.

Last year I struggled to frame a project. This year the project seems obvious (to me, at least).

I have lots and lots of photographs, taken over the last few years, that have yet to see the light of day. I am hoping there will be a good many more photographs taken in 2015. As a result, I am going to keep this blog up and running, but this time I really do want the looser, almost structureless, approach I envisaged and failed to achieve in 2014.

So there will be a photographic blog, this blog, and I shall post photos and maybe some words on and off throughout the year, but I am not going to stipulate a timeframe for the postings (even in my head). Sometimes I may post several times in one month. Other months, I may post nothing at all. There may be a theme to each post, or there may not. Themes could be as simple as a batch of photos I took at a specific time or a specific location, or they could be like the black and white theme of this post and straddle different time periods and various locations. In other words, I shall post photos as and when the fancy takes me.

If anything, I am hoping that the posts become more log or diary like and reflect things that I am doing, people I've seen, events I've witnessed, but look here, I haven't even finished typing this first post of the year and I'm already thinking of structures to frame this blog, when what I really want is a blog without structure and the freedom to post photos for themselves and not necessarily their context (although context is fine too - I really do want to keep things free and open). Slapped wrists and lots of refocusing on not focusing is obviously called for.

So, wish me luck in my new would-be photographic endeavours and please do follow this blog, or drop by from time to time to see how it is progressing. I do hope you enjoy the images and words posted so far and the many that I hope will come after.


I once more declare this blog officially open, but this time for 2015!