Several months ago I wrote about the creative benefits of having one’s own website. Even if no one knows about it, or if no one visits it, it is still a very beneficial thing to have, if you are in any way interested in improving your photography, or in trying to develop a sense of your own aesthetic style, then having a sand box to play in is hugely beneficial. My sand box is my website, and I like to think of it more as a garden.

It is a garden for this one reason: it is a place where you can plant conceptual ideas, or arrange your images in different formats. It is a place where you can watch ideas grow.

Personal websites tend to have a life of their own, and I find that I am always tending mine. My website has become instructive in helping me sort out what works and what doesn’t, and also in instructing me as to where my current work is leading me.

I’ve been feeling as though I was in a wilderness the past few years. Since covid hit, the website became very static. I started to feel it was representing myself and all it was telling me was ‘you are stuck’.

My website was telling me the truth, and I knew it.

I couldn’t go anywhere, and I couldn’t produce any new work. This feeling continued even when I began to go back to running tours and workshops and I could travel again, and my website confirmed it to me. I could see it in the layout of the work presented there.

It told me that I’m needing to go find some new places. It has shown me that it is time to find other places, and there is work going on in the background to make that happen. But it will take time.

In the meantime, I went through several iterations feeling unhappy, and knowing why that was so. It is only in the past month that I feel that I’ve turned a corner. By re-organising the front page, I noticed there was more of a cohesive theme between the portfolios than I had assumed.

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I don’t quite know what’s changed, but I am of the opinion that unlike the saying ‘calm before the storm’, there tends to be chaos in one’s own work before it all starts to feel like it is making sense. It is only since re-organising that I now see that what I felt were loose ends were actually all aesthetically bound together: the work is more abstract than it once was. I am more interested in anonymous locations than the ‘honey pot’ spots, and I’ve been moving towards fine tuning how I convey the places I have come to know so well over the past several years. This last point in case, I think is illustrated well by the six images above.

Having one’s own website to explore how one feels about their work is important.

Postscript: the above images will feature in this month’s coming newsletter about portfolio development.