One thing that reading a Master's Degree does for your life is to choke off the time for some of life's gentler pleasures, such as blogging. On the one hand you feel as if you have little to report from day to day, or week to week: "This week: still writing the essay. Sixth week on the trot!" On the other, the rhythm of your activity, divided as it is into semester-long tranches, channels your work into a series of periodic culminations that follow months of labour, tutorials and fretting that leaves you feeling distinctly disinclined to share; you simply don't have any emotional or intellectual energy left. I have never worked so hard, and there's so much further to go.
Why, then, am I writing now? I am still immersed in shooting my Final Major Project and in overhauling my website and writing for Professional Practise. My Degree Show isn't until September. What is it that makes this moment different to the many other moments that have passed without comment since September 2014? Perhaps it's my perspective on myself. I began the process of reviewing my website a few months ago and concluded that, beyond doubt, I am a different photographer to the one who who started this degree. I'm a firm believer in lifelong personal change and evolution and the changes, intellectual and creative, that were set in motion two years ago have started to assume a greater degree of definition. Perhaps that's another reason why there was almost no blogging, the sense of personal flux I have experienced is a state in which it is difficult to state anything with certainty.
Many of the pictures I created in the period leading up to a couple of years ago no longer sit comfortably on this site now that my work has become more reflective. It is, however, the work that helped to make the case for my acceptance onto my degree and I still like much of it. On that basis I'll be zapping a lot of this work back out via Instagram and Twitter, picture by picture, where it can live forever in the digital social realm.
As for me, it's back to work!
My muddy handprint on the corridor wall at the now defunct University of Brighton Photography and Moving Image building at Circus Street. My hands were muddy from installing the turf for my assessment installation, January 27th 2016.