This is why I started a diary. It's hard to understand who you are, what your interests are, what you were thinking about in the moment and how that changes over time. You have to some corpus of work that you can look back on to see that.
I would also append some caution to that. Your current biases can significantly distort your perception of the past. You can get caught up in zeitgeist or have rationalized away a ton of deeper truths you're now too old to comfortably confront.
You can easily overlook details you meticulously labored over in the past and fail to appreciate how much of it is now way over your head. You cannot assume you're "better" today just because you have more experience.
In fact, experience does have a tendency to throw away significant chunks of critical insight and give a false sense of confidence and arrogance. This doesn't just apply to judging your own work either. Just because something "worked out" for you doesn't mean you were right.
How many people spend too much of their later lives settling for the same patterns over and over wondering where their creative edge went? There it is, and it's all because you thought you figured something out that you never really did.
> I’m not claiming some unconscious genius or some innate sense of history. What I realised was that practised consistently over time, photography builds an archive that eventually thinks back at you.
Yes, I would have loved if this blog post elaborated on that more instead of repeatedly coming back to the topic of hostile architecture.
"The camera doesn’t create the consistent thread. It doesn’t decide to take an interest in hostile architecture, for example. It is your curiosity that does and that lets in details into your archived where they live unnoticed until one day you get struck by a realisation."
Or maybe this is just apophenia, with a sprinkle of confirmation bias.
You can easily overlook details you meticulously labored over in the past and fail to appreciate how much of it is now way over your head. You cannot assume you're "better" today just because you have more experience.
In fact, experience does have a tendency to throw away significant chunks of critical insight and give a false sense of confidence and arrogance. This doesn't just apply to judging your own work either. Just because something "worked out" for you doesn't mean you were right.
How many people spend too much of their later lives settling for the same patterns over and over wondering where their creative edge went? There it is, and it's all because you thought you figured something out that you never really did.
We refuse to confront the problem head on so it instead comes up everywhere. A lot of things are like this. Repression only takes you so far.
Yes, I would have loved if this blog post elaborated on that more instead of repeatedly coming back to the topic of hostile architecture.
Or maybe this is just apophenia, with a sprinkle of confirmation bias.