Clarification of yesterday's post.

Yesterday I wrote that I was pondering what to do next with this blog. One of the reasons was/is the declining engagement I can see in the numbers. I didn't mean that my loyal readers had lost interest or that I needed to hear from them more often in the comments (though that is always pleasant). What I was referring to was strictly numerical. Over the last several years there has been a decline in the number of overall visits to the blog and a decline in page views (which are two different metrics).

What I think we all know from my assessment of the marketplace in my 2013 blog post entitled, "The Greying of Traditional Photography" is that fewer and fewer people are embracing photography the way my generation has practiced it and are, instead, using their phones and making as their final targets sharing sites such as Instagram which more or less repudiate the need for large files, high degrees of production value and technical skills. Forget dynamic range and resolution! It's not good or bad but the trend replaces large files which are meant to be printed and seen in stasis with quick, off the cuff images destined for short half lives and writ out at 2200 pixels. And always keeping in mind that most screens are about 6 bits... Something different from older bloggers' firm ideas that the black and white print is still the gold standard and something every artist/photographer should be aspiring to.

What this means for a blog like this one is that the effective audience is ever aging and there is an unspoken pressure on the writer (me) to conform to my generation's expectations and tastes when we collectively discuss "photography." Ansel Adams would be so proud of us...

So, declining audience, schism between where modern culture is taking the "idea" of photography as an art form and what we think of as "correct," and an aversion to endlessly repeating myself. The problem is that there are so few blogs about photography left standing and, in truth, there are a lot of people who do a good job talking about photography in a more modern and sensible way on YouTube and other video sharing channels. Someone mentioned that I could transition to YouTube successfully and I'm in general agreement but I'd be starting over from scratch to build a new audience since my general audience and age cohort grew up reading the printed word and seems to prefer to get their entertainment/information about photography in that medium.

Building a video channel and marketing it is hard work. If I needed to make money I could find dozens of ways to do it more effectively and with more assurance. But that's the weird disconnect in all of this; I don't monetize the blog. I don't sell other people's prints and take a cut. I don't review cameras with an eye to the affiliate revenue should my review be enticing enough. I'd feel weird accepting Patreon funding when it's not needed to fulfill a worthwhile end result. And, being of the same generation as the majority of my readers, I really enjoy the process of writing and reading.

The choice for me is not to morph the content into something new or to change the channel or re-start as a YouTube producer. It all really boils down to a choice between spending personal time (which is happily now more plentiful) making my own work or dividing that time to write blogs just because I have written blogs consistently in the past. 

That's what I'm really grappling with. In our generational cohort, as it intersects with photography, there are two blogs that I can identify as "popular" though both are suffering from declining general audience interest. Those two are mine and Michael Johnston's. And while we most likely share the same views on politics we are worlds apart on so much else. Michael's site is a bastion of traditional photography. And traditional writing styles. He owns that space. We might be bored to tears by snooker or vegan diet fads but at the core his passion is the black and white printed image --- on paper. And it's a shared passion with the majority of his audience. You can see it in every engagement on his blog about actual photography.

On the other hand I'm more or less ambivalent about whether an images is printed or not, or what its provenance is, or its position in the hierarchy of traditional order. And whether or not its creator is historic, well known or otherwise culturally vetted. I find most landscapes profoundly boring and discussions of how we used to work in darkrooms about as interesting as discussing rotary phone dial mechanics in the age of cellphones. 

The issue for me is that MJ has succeeded in finding and catering to a specific audience centered around a singular common passion while my ambivalence to tradition and lack of embrace for the icons of the past in our field robs my audience of any way-finding landmarks with which to anchor them to my writing here. I'm too transparent and too opinionated to create the stickiness required to become a "personality" in the blog sphere. And that's always the sine wave of my feelings about the blog. It's mostly written for me and that makes me feel guilty in that I don't customize the content for the greatest marketing impact.

I'm just coasting with the blog right now. I like having it as a place to share thoughts and images but at the same time I don't like overt conflict and I'm reticent to share things that will just rile up vocal parts of the remaining audience. We all know Trump was an evil psychopath, that trickle down economics never worked, that we should be discarding fossil fuels and that we should have social systems that help us take care of the neediest parts of our population. We know that white supremacy is evil and that trans fats are bad for our health. But we don't talk about these things because I don't have the temperament to argue nicely with mis-guided idiots who believe the earth is flat and that Jesus saved us by killing off the dinosaurs. Vaccines work. Repressive voting laws don't. The only people who committed voter fraud, interestingly enough, are republicans. But who wants to argue with people who are incapable of objectively reading history or using logic and compassion simultaneously? Not me. 

Most current photography is bland. Most writing about it is even blander. Most emulation of past century techniques just for the sake of replicating stuff from the past is boring. But why is it so hard to move on?

Just a few thoughts while waiting for a portrait customer who called to say she is running late....