Has it been ten?

tintypeHere it is , shockingly my tenth anniversary of blogging. And by that I should say that I mean the appearance of my life online, first on Livejournal, then WordPress, then on to my own site, and through Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and the rest. There are so many places now, where bits and dabs of my daily rounds have been stuck. These days, I rarely write sentences, much less paragraphs and essays, now it comes through my phone or it doesn’t come.

But blogging has brought me much, and the reflexive way that I hoist things online is both a distraction and a conduit for another kind of creativity. The picture above was made by a man that I ran across on Instagram, as he asked for an assistant for his tintype operation today. Seeing that, I resolved to have a portrait made, and was lucky enough to secure an appointment and sit for him, at the Hester Street Fair. This version above is the plate, rephotographed with my phone, and edited there, uploaded to google+ and then downloaded to my Chromebook, from whence I uploaded it to here, This is publishing. This is broadcasting, this is the fabrication of an image and notion of myself in the world, that is both exterior to me and made from the things I will and the things I can buy. So it is another kind of index, one that marks my  various kinds of entitlement over the years.

My first blog post was about trying to break creativity from the crutch of digital memory. This seems harder to imagine now, but still valid. Blogging taught me the value of daily working, and this year I have drawn every day. Usually I find the subject from books, or bits of observation during the day. Online, I constantly click on images, saving them for later reference, But truth be told, I rarely use them. It is still within the physical that my imagination functions. There are still bits that stubbornly refuse to find a digital place.

 

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