Blogging can be hard if you only have personal things to talk about, I think, things that are interesting to yourself but only because you are who you are. It is much easier writing about something that you know a lot about and that is interesting to a range of people regardless of whether they know you or not. Funnily enough, if you are some kind of health care guru or spiritual person the realm of the interesting can include personal matters as well, but for normal folk it usually doesn’t. (I think this is the first time in years I have used ‘normal’ without scare quotes.)
There is one blogger whom I greatly admire for his distanced and yet personable voice and the quality of his posts. Dan Jurak, who is a Canadian photographer, posts reguarly, which I appreciate, and he is very consistent in the kinds of things he writes. There is usually a problem of sorts, e.g. ‘how to take a good picture when the light is bad’, and Dan gives expert advice interwoven with anecdotal evidence. Very nice. Here’s an example:
The sun was ten minutes from setting when I came upon a field flush with foxtails. Foxtails for those that don’t know are a weed on the prairie. There was some kind of construction going on in what last year was a field of canola. No crop this year and the weeds had taken it over. I don’t often see fields without crops around here. It makes no sense for the land owner to lose income for the year.
So I hopped out once again into the wind and the mosquitoes. As I write this, I am still coughing up one of the unfortunate guys that I inhaled. I shot til a few minutes after the sun set, not confident that I had anything. My intended cloud was becoming darker and further away by the moment. There would be other days chasing clouds.
I processed a few images and chose this one to post. Not what I intended. Nothing at all for what I had hoped. That’s how it usually goes.
Photography is an easy subject to comingle the personal with the impersonal. I try doing that with sociology because that’s my field of expertise but have so far found that to be much, much harder. I don’t think it needs to be, to be honest, and maybe all it takes is a bit of practice to make sociological analysis come easy. Here’s the first reason why I think I should try it anyway:
Sociology is a purely academic discipline; you cannot be an independent sociological consultant, for instance, great though that would be. No, when you’re a sociologist you’re working in an institution or on a project, and when you’re an independent sociologist, well, then you’re saying in a euphemistic way that you’re unemployed. So sociologists are tucked away in universities and worry their little heads about very serious problems, no doubt, but probably the kind of problems that requires a PhD to even identify. Meanwhile, Joe Bloggs walks along, identifies some sort of problem and instantly attribute cause and blame to persons rather than structures because he has never learned that there are such things as social structures. (Politicians don’t seem to have heard that one either, or would like to forget it I guess. It’s them that need the biggest dose of sociological insight, I tells ya.) Structures are constraining or enabling, as the case may be. They are the strings that hold back single mums from, generally speaking, having a great career or that cause poor kids not to waste too much thought on getting a university education because they know that they will have to start earning money early on to support their parents.
How does this connect with photography? Look at the two photos below. They aren’t particularly great shots but they may serve to make a point. The first one zooms into a segment of the view, the full extent of which you can see in the second photo.
From an aesthetic point of view I personally prefer the first photo. It focuses on a few nice gables, then there’s the spire – kinda neat. But what’s the problem with it? It has no good base line – the viewer doesn’t know where the photographer is situated – and it is therefore unclear what the photo relates to. Ultimately, the shot therefore remains meaningless. For it to be meaningful the gables would have to be a lot more special or the tower of a rare style, so as it is, the photo is lacking something.
It is different with the second shot. This one tells you straight away how the view relates to the photographer in terms of space; her position is slightly elevated (1st floor in fact) and she probably took this photo from within a building. There is a foreground, a yard that mostly belongs to next door while the green wall forms a sort of boundary for the area in which the photographer is located. And then there are the gables in the distance. This photo gives you a lot more information, both about the photographer as well as about the subjective meaning of the gables: they may well be the pretty orientation points in the distance that detract the viewers focus from the mundane in the foreground. Still not a great shot but one that tells you more and that invites you to wonder if this is maybe a view out of a window in someone’s apartment (it is) and could you imagine living with that view, what kind of view would you like if you could choose…
One photo is abstract and harder to relate to, the other one isn’t, and I think it is like this with social life too if we consider the enabling and constraining structures that affect people’s thoughts and actions. These structures are social but they are as real as the window from in the second picture: if you want to represent the view then it’s got to be there and then this is what it looks like. It’s not an ideal view but such is life. Likewise, if you want to represent the complexitiy of social life so that others can understand it, then you also have to give it full attention, and that means including social facts such as family background, education, income, gender, race etc. and cultural factors such as values and norms in the analysis. And in order to do that so that other people understand it too, you have to come out of that little ivory tower and walk the walk, too. People have to be able to relate, as it is when they realise how that abstract stuff affects themselves too that they begin to take an interest.
So, this is a long-winded way of saying that blogging can be a fantastic way of intermingling personal anecdotal evidence with expert insight. I hope that Bookling’s World can be testimony to this in future much more so than it has been in the past.
