I haven’t posted on this blog in ages. Worse yet, I haven’t taken a photo since this fall. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s part burnout and stress from working at a horrible daily paper, part exhaustion from not having the time to take photos for myself, part my gear giving out and part frustration from attending the Visa pour l’Image festival in Perpignan, France this August.
Let’s take it by the numbers
- The burnout and stress is easy to diagnose. After barely 9 months of full-time 7 days-a-week work for a small, tiny, politically colored local paper, I was about ready to burst. Most of it was frustration with the management and higher-ups, demands to work on stuff I had no interest in (like uploading texts to the paper’s website) and the lack of pay (I still haven’t gotten my paychecks for May-September). It started to wear me down and I kind of… just stopped taking photos. An awesome trip to Berlin with Ibis and a small photo exhibition we organized there helped, but it took me out of the horrible work environment for just long enough to realize that i needed to quit right then. So, good-bye job! Things were looking bright, I thought - I had more free time, time to shoot photos for my own enjoyment, the festival in Perpignan was coming up, everything was going to be cool.
- The festival in Perpignan was an eye-opener. Mostly not in a good way. I went there for winning an award in a photography contest that was supported by the French Cultural Center and it turned out that the trip was mostly a cultural exchange and not a photography thing. The festival itself was so focused on war photography, disaster, tragedy and violence that the photos seemed to lose all their newsworthiness, value and message. I did see a few bright spots, a few (not surprisingly) female photojournalists who told great, touching stories through their photos without it being focused on violence and death, but those were few and far between. The highpoint for me was seeing Stephanie Sinclair’s work on the Polygamists series and her talk afterwards. During the festival, my already-worn gear got trashed even more and it started giving out.
-All of this together kind of made me stop and take a break. Not necessarily to think about stuff, but a time without taking photos. In October, after months of troubles, my only zoom lens died and I got left with a laggy, unfocused 50mm (that I love so dearly). I don’t think I’ve taken more than 50 photos since then
And there I was - enthusiasm kind of petered out, gear in a not-so-enviable condition and no money to speak of. I finally decided to find at least temporary work in a different field and right now, I’m at the end of my workday, 8 hours of coding and fiddling with linux, looking forward to going home, spending some time with Ibis, reading and painting miniatures. The work has been great for me since it’s given me time to think even more about photography, photojournalism and where I see myself in all of that. And I’m finally starting to miss having a camera in my hands and have started planning projects. Small ones, personal and intimate, nothing grandiose.
But something.
