It's Okay If You Never Read This
Welcome to my first newsletter. I've called it Retrospect, but I'm not really being retrospective with this first entry. To be honest I wasn’t sure how I was going to proceed with this newsletter; in fact, I don’t really know what it is yet, but perhaps we’ll find out together.
I was tempted to summarise the outgoing year as many others have done. It's a great way to assess the goal(s) you’ve set previously, the path you’re on and to imagine where you want that path to lead going into the new year.
I’m not going to do that.
Instead I’m going to share some of my thoughts on social media and how my disdain for it has led me here. Part of the reason I’ve started this newsletter is because I want to pull away from social media. I imagine myself speaking directly to a community engaged with my work and interests, free of algorithmic whims out of my control. A primary benefit for me, being a more purposeful and deliberate way to interact with the endless screens I’m perpetually illuminated by.
But I also realise that on some level, that’s a pretty naive wish. Ideally social media is, or rather can be, a tool anybody can use to share their work, engage with their audiences and communities and expand upon their own knowledge bases. However, my relationship with social media is mostly compulsive and reactionary. In the past I’ve tried to break those habits by enforcing long breaks from it where I've aimed to focus on making work away from what feels like distraction. This time I want to try something different and I think that may require my being more intentional.
I don’t think I’m completely alone in these feelings. I think that part of the reason social media is such a gripping phenomenon is because there's a genuine desire for us to be in community. In that way, there’s a real sense of us existing within contradiction, since the capitalist models that shape the way we do pretty much everything, push for us to embrace individualism. It means positive desires get easily warped in unsatisfying ways. Instead of being able to learn from one another with applied nuance and grace we try to digitally pummel one another from our staunch positions to the rhythm of a character limit. There’s less room for diversity of thought or appearance, less patience for ignorance and no acknowledgement of the constant necessity for growth. In between and amongst all of this is an unabating, ubiquitous, ever-present and universal stream of adverts. Some faceless entity is at all times, simultaneously trying to sell us everything and nothing at all, so that after a point I feel as if I'm scrolling through one single never-ending ad. It’s… tiresome.
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I have a confession to make.
I’m subscribed to a few newsletters but I rarely read many through. I love learning about the experiences in the field, the processes and general lives of other artists and I’ll listen to podcasts and I’ll watch videos, but I don’t read many newsletters.
I normally scan them, sometimes I’ll even re-scan promising myself I’ll go back to read properly, but I rarely do. And It’s not about not having the time, not really, though of course how many of us ever truly have any time? No It’s more about being intentional. My plan isn't to completely drop all screen exposure. Instead my hope is to use social media with real purpose and intent as and when it’s required. And so that is what I hope to make my theme for the year ahead, intentionality. And that goes beyond just social media. I’ve had some sobering conversations with friends and colleagues in recent months who have helped me realise I need to be working with more intention professionally too. Let’s see how it all goes.
So here's yet another newsletter and given that I struggle to read them, I suppose it’s odd that I would decide to start my own. I think it’s more about my hopes for what starting a newsletter can do for my being more intentional. If you ask a photographer why they spend copious amounts of money buying, developing and scanning film, they might say it’s just as much about the process as it is about the result. So maybe the process of keeping the spilling of my thoughts limited to newsletter form, will do for me on social media, what spending slow but enjoyable minutes focusing on a ground glass with two loupes does for me when I’m composing a portrait.
It’s all part of trying to be more intentional. So, given whose newsletter it is you’re reading, if you scan read this and promise to come back to it but never do, you’re forgiven. And if you actually took some time out of your day to read it all I’m truly grateful. The intention is to write more and I'm cautiously optimistic. Still, if you never read this one, that's okay too.
