I have blogged, now I newsletter
A trip down a rabbit hole looking at different textbooks seemed like a good idea to start a newsletter. It is not like I don't have enough on my plate at the moment.
A Bit of Background:
I was a newspaper photographer who chose to stay working at legacy publications when the internet revolution happened. Eventually, I started dipping my toes into the internet waters with a Blogger account and eventually moved to WordPress around 2007 when I started the blog Words On Photography, as part of a project for a class during graduate school. Blogs were the hot thing then, and I have strong opinions and thought I could contribute. It seemed more doable than trying to make web art.
The blog lasted a while. The Wayback Machine tells me it was from November 2007 through July 2018. It was initially a subdomain on my website, then for a few years, I broke it out on its own. I wrote book reviews, posted about topics of the day, and touched on photojournalism a fair bit.
During the heyday of the blog, I was also writing book reviews for Photo-eye. All of these writing adventures were on top of the teaching load and eventual full-time job working as the photography lab tech at the University of North Texas.
I did get to a point where it felt like I had run out of things to say about the books I was reviewing. I had hit a creative low point and felt empty. The blog stopped, and I stopped writing book reviews. This was about the time that blogs started to wane due to the increase in other social media, especially Facebook. Some of the conversations surrounding photography and photojournalism switched to Twitter and become smaller but spicier bites.
Fast forward a few years, I live in a new state and have a new teaching job.
The pandemic happened. I am not going into the fallout of that here.
Needless to say, the skills I have developed writing for the web has helped me through the transition to more online delivery of the classes I have been teaching.
Since August 2019, I have been in Wisconsin and working as a lecturer teaching photography and an introductory digital arts class. I am not just a tech and adjunct any longer. I am the voice for photography in the department I am in. Getting used to this has taken some time. It was also one of the reasons why I pulled back on social media in general, except for my off-the-cuff hot takes on Formula 1.
Why a Newsletter, and Why Now:
I follow a number of newsletters. I find that I tend to read more of the Substack newsletters because of the app on my phone. I am not a fan of email and I don’t like reading newsletters in my email. The app sold me on Substack. I am not sure what will come of this effort. Adding a blog to my website would be easy, but I am going to try this and see what happens. I feel like I have an idea of something to write about to get me going and we will see what happens when I run through this line of thinking. I am interested in trying something new too.
Two weeks remain in the Spring 2023 semester at the state university I teach at. This is the time of year when I start thinking about how this year has gone, and what I could do to make it better. I am always trying to keep my classes fresh. This semester I changed a number of elements in the classes I teach.
An email from the bookstore asking if I would have a textbook for next semester started me wondering if I needed to change up my approach to teaching and what I am offering students in terms of supporting materials. It was in the back of my mind when I came across two books at a used bookstore recently.
They were two different textbooks on photojournalism. One of them is more popular and seemingly widely used. The other was one I had not seen before and was a bit older. I skimmed through both and wondered if this is where the tropes related to photojournalism started. That thought caught me off guard but stayed with me. Later, I found myself wondering if other photography-related textbooks help to encourage the trope of art school photographs.
One weekend afternoon when I had a fair amount of grading to do, I started scouring Amazon and the university library for different photojournalism and photography textbooks. This idea was still knocking around my head and I wanted to see where it took me.
I now have more books than I know what to do with. My goal is to start going through them and see what I can learn along the lines of how photographs are read and written about in different genres (journalism and art). I also want to see if there are photographers I am missing or could fit within my classes better than those I am currently using.
It is usually during the summer months when I dive deeper into the histories, criticism, or particular photographers. My end goal is knowledge and ideas for my classes. If I get more out of that, then that is a bonus.
My hope is that you dear reader, will also find it interesting.
WOOOOOOOOOOOO
Good to see you here, Tom!