Let your camera flow in your wake

My ‘mate from OU, the super talented Peter McCollough has started a blog and there you will find a recent post entitled Dear Diary: Lost At Sea. Have Degree, But No More Photography that is F’ing brilliant. If everyone was this open and honest with their thoughts this community would be an amazingly rich place. Thanks Peter.

Here’s a taste:

Every day my pictures change a little to me, they’re constantly shifting in their skin, taking on altered meanings. I’m a bit taken aback by this because I’m usually quite decisive with these things. But trying to make sense of them has become less like photo editing and more like chasing chickens or being lost at sea.

Now that I have a degree in photography and I’m trying to find a way to support myself with it, and after I have spent so much time and energy thinking and talking about it, photography has become less something I love and more like a large, heavy brick of commerce, structure, industry, expectation and duty that I carry around on my back. I no longer feel like I live my life being free, interacting and loving, letting my camera follow in its wake but like my life follows behind my camera–my camera that is no longer a tool of beauty or freedom but just another spoke in the machine.

Part of the reason I pursued photography was so that I could avoid tangling myself up with too much specificity and to allow my emotions flow out of me with ease. I guess everything you run away from finds you in the end. I feel like photography has been dying in my eyes for the past two years, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing, maybe it will be reincarnated as something else.

I mean, after all…..