a ten-year challenge

Today is the 10th birthday of Forms Traced By Light: one photograph (or more) taken that same day, with at least a sentence of two of writing - often much more - accompanying it.  I haven't missed a single day: just occasionally, when there's been some internet problem, I've not managed to upload the image, or the writing, that day (although in almost everyone of those cases, I've at least managed to shoot off an alert, and often the image itself to Face Book).

The best laid plans … So, for a while, I have seen this milestone coming up.  I have plotted – in my head – the long discursive essay that I meant to write about this blog as daily practice: taking at least one photo a day; writing about it; training myself to look at the ordinary and the visual beauties, surprises, and documentary possibilities that it offers.  There’s still an essay, somewhere, to come.

And then …time started to run out.  I thought at the very least I would bake it a cake; put ten candles on it; take the cake’s picture, and use it as a jumping off point.  That didn’t happen: work obligations have made this a hugely truncated weekend.  Perhaps, then, I thought, a cupcake or a muffin from Gelsons, when I went down to buy urgent pre-dinner supplies (onions, arugula, San Pellegrino, wine).  It was only when I came back that I realized that I’d forgotten the ceremonial baked good.  

So I cast my eyes around.  This stands, indeed, for one of those fairly rare days when taking a photograph has seemed like an obligation, not a pleasure; when I find myself at nine or ten in the evening looking, rather desperately, for something – anything – that might be an object of record.  Cats, flowers … you’ve seen them.  These are the same subjects that have provided very useful stand-ins for the days in which I’ve simply been unable to take a picture of what’s really been dominating the day – usually work-related stuff.  For of course, I do self-censor: I allude only in the broadest terms to departmental politics (and three separate stints of chairing during the last ten years have brought plenty of them), and to various other meetings and responsibilities.  

And yes – a candle, on the kitchen windowsill: not a commemorative cake-candle, but a candle in the form of a coyote.  That’s especially apt today – there have been lots of coyote howls outside, and as I drove down the road to buy those onions, two coyotes trotted boldly up the road.  I was foiled in taking a picture – I reached for the camera that’s almost always riding shotgun with me in the car, and then saw that someone was backing out of his garage, waiting for me.  How do you signal the presence of coyotes in the street that he can’t see?  Tooting my horn made him decidedly impatient – and by the time we’d negotiated that, the coyotes had melted off to do whatever evil deed they next had in mind.

I light the candle; I darken the kitchen; I focus … and yes! My camera reads Battery Exhausted.  Waiting for it to charge up a bit gives me the space to write more than I’ve usually managed to of late – partly a function of time, of course; but partly a wavering uncertainty – one that’s been increasingly there for most of the past ten years – about tone; about readership; about genre; about self-revelation (or not) – is this a public diary, or an experimental set of personal essays, or documentary, or – well, the idea of it being something of scholarly meditation on the role and nature of photography probably disappeared before Year Two.

So do more than a handful of people ever read Forms?  Look at the pictures, yes, but more?  I’ve deliberately stuck to an identical format for ten years, even though I know that shifting to Instagram, or putting the whole amount of what I write into Facebook, might well have given me a larger readership.  

And then – now what?  I’m expecting that my camera battery will be sufficiently charged by now to take the image of the coyote candle that you will have already seen.  Do I carry on?  Forms has become such a part of my daily life that I find it impossible to imagine ceasing this image plus prose mode – but was it, all along, just – just a year’s challenge?  A five-year challenge?  A ten year challenge?  I guess I’ll find out – but it’s a strange feeling to have carried out something that would have seemed unimaginable ten years ago, when I first started Forms Traced by Light.