I typed a longish, rambling entry about an hour ago...accidentally hit a bookmark and of course upon hitting the back button my entry was gone. But that's fine, it's always better the second time. (of course I did spend the intervening hour playing doom after the crushing disappointment of realizing what had happened)

What I typed before was that I spent a lot of time today thinking about my motivations and worrying that they're wrong and I'm an awful dilettetantish twit pretending to be an 'artist' when I take out of focus pictures. All this came from Tuesday's post and worrypas's comment on it, which got me wondering.

My conclusion is no - I take pictures because I love them and I love seeing, and I rarely think about them, and if I do, it's afterwards. And, like I tried to at the beginning of this month, I should really just shut up. I can't seem to shut up. But failing that, I'm going to keep more of my pictures to myself. I kept one today!

But speaking of ideas, theories, and their inadequacies, I saw this on a blog that I didn't read until today:

"Some photographers think the idea is enough. I told a good story in my Getty talk, a beautiful story, to the point:

Ducasse says to his friend Mallarmé - I think this is a true story - he says,

'You know, I've got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good.'

Mallarmé says, 'Of course, you don't make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words.'

Really good, huh? Really true. So, photographers who aren't so good think that you make photographs out of ideas. And they generally get only about halfway to the photograph and think that they're done."

John Skarkowski