Um, yeah

Oh, come on. If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you couldn’t possibly have expected me to hang it up for very long, could you?

I had every intention of staying away for the summer, or at least through mid-July. As I alluded to in my last post, I was wrestling with a couple issues. First, there was the very real sense that I was spending too much time reading other people’s blogs, and I’m not going to argue that. There are simply a ton of interesting blogs and interesting photographers out there, and moderation and I have never been acquaintances, much less friends. In other words, I was bingeing on blogs and I had a serious hangover. And in the midst of that hangover, I wasn’t differentiating clearly between reading dozens of other blogs, and writing my own. It was like getting drunk on alcohol and swearing off milk.

I wrote that post and waited a couple days to publish it, to make sure I meant what I said. I didn’t want to be all melodramatic and declare my blog over, only to regret it the next day. (It always sucks to have to call your boyfriend the morning after a big fight and say, “Oh, so when I broke up with you? Yeah, I didn’t know what I was saying. We’re good now, right?”) I think I knew, deep down (and S. knew it when I read him the draft, and after I published the post), that I love blogging. Not because of all the reasons I was worried about loving it—not because I was getting more hits or more e-mails from readers or more recognition (and believe me, it’s not like I have, or—so far—deserve, that much). But because this blog is, and always has been for me, a place where I can work out my own thoughts and feelings—whether frustration or excitement or confusion or anger or even, god forbid, the occasional (and short-lived) bout of ennui. Often, I’ve come to some important realization about my work, or myself, through writing this blog. (When I don’t figure out what I think about a subject by talking about it, I figure it out by writing about it.)

I am not not photographing because of my blog—if I were publishing as much as Rachel Hulin does over on the PhotoShelter blog, maybe I could use that excuse. In fact, I’m not not photographing at all. I am photographing. I’m not taking three-week trips down the Mississippi, but I’m snatching the time where I can every day. That’s what I can do right now, and that works for me.

So I’m back, with my list of blogs in my Google Reader dramatically reduced, eager anticipation of the new edition of The Americans set to be delivered from photo-eye on Friday, and new images in my camera. Now is the time to “stop focusing on the quantity of work that’s out there and focus on the work that matters to me.” But this is part of the work that matters to me, and it only took four days—and a publicly declared, self-imposed break—to make me realize that.