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| Blake Andrews, Emmett, 2011 |
This is the first of three interview posts with Eugene, Oregon-based Blake Andrews, a photographer and member of iN-PUBLiC. He runs the photography blog B and is also involved with the Portland area photography groups Lightleak and Portland Grid Project. The second part will be published next Thursday.
Blake’s early history, experiences with iN-PUBLiC, role as a photoblogger, thoughts on street photography as well as influences both contemporary and historic have been covered fairly thoroughly in interviews here, here, here, here, and here.
The following questions attempt to complement these previous interviews and you may enjoy reading one or all of them along with this one.
fototazo: I have one question for you on the blog: what kept you working on it as many others dropped theirs?
Blake Andrews: That's a good question, and well-timed too because my blog is actually now on indefinite hiatus. But during the 4+ years I kept the blog current, the main thing that kept me going was just sheer enjoyment. I like writing. I like trying ideas on for size. At a certain point the blog gained a level of inertia. It had a momentum of its own, and so I had to feed it every day. And the pouring out of ideas on one end seemed to help ideas generate on the creative end, like a siphon hose. It was there every morning staring at me like a hungry lion. Feed me.
In its last year or so the blog evolved for me into a sort of art project. I wasn't interested so much in writing expository essays as toying with the whole form. I was asking, what the heck is a blog? What is it expected to look like and why? How can it be different? So that's what generated a lot of the recent experimentation, changing headers every day and making up new profile locations and colors, and all the polls, and making the background fade like an old newspaper. I went through a long series where I gave each post a song name, and I named posts after photo books, and posted things upside down or inside out or whatever. Anything to just try something different, to keep myself entertained, to make myself laugh. When I'd write posts that made me laugh out loud that's when I knew I had something good.
Gradually I wound up creating this online persona. B is sort of a crazy cynic. I suppose there's a part of me that's like that, but in many ways it's not me at all. I'm actually a nice guy. I'm shy. But for whatever reason I carved out this territory online where I'm a weird photo-geek who'll say just about anything. And I've probably sabotaged any hope of a fine art photo career in the process. So be it. But it is troubling that people know me as a blogger rather than a photographer. People reading my blog might call for me to be committed, but the truth is I'm very committed, as a photographer.
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| Blake Andrews, Eugene, 2005 |
I guess what it comes down to is I'm not really a critic. I feel silly cranking out some educated-sounding critique about a photo project or trends or whatever. Who am I to be an authority on any of that? But what I am an authority on is my own life, and so I tried to root the blog in personal exploration. Every post had at least one subtext, and often two or three, many of which only made sense to me. It became a sort of scientific workbench, a place to dissect and recombine ideas. But in the end it was mostly for me. I often felt a disconnect with readers, like I was saying one thing and they were reading something else. The posts which really made me laugh rarely received comments.
In the past year the blog began to feel more like an obligation and less organic. If I didn't write something for a day or two, I felt like I was letting folks down. I started to track hits, page views, comments and a lot of other meaningless crap, just to try to gauge who was reading. Why did they read it? What did they want? When I found myself worrying about that stuff I knew the end was near. My post about dead photoblogs last December was a premonition, but it was unconscious. I didn't realize at the time that I was writing about myself.
A main problem since the beginning is that my blog has gotten in the way of my photography. I have many photo projects that I want to pursue and a certain amount of free time. But as long as the blog was around, it's what received my energy. Ideally there should be a way to do both, to pursue projects and keep a blog up. If I could do the blog as a little side thing and just write one post a week it would be great. Some people can do that, but I've found that style doesn't work well for me. If I'm not writing every day my posts don't have the right snap. In order to write well or perform any task really I need to get sort of obsessed. And I was obsessed with B. But it was keeping me from getting obsessed with my own photography. So on March 1st I decided to go cold turkey and put it on hold for a while. At first I just thought I'd leave it for a few weeks. I've done this before a few times when I needed to recharge and always resumed blogging. But I'm really enjoying the time off so I may extend it indefinitely. We'll see. I honestly don't know what's going to happen. It's really up in the air. I've been tinkering with it a bit lately, slowly lightening the text every few days, letting past posts fade into the blank page. I think that might be a good way to end it.
One of my projects while my blog is down is to compile B's archives into a series of Blurb books, not for sale but just to allow me to make a hardcopy of what I've done. I got freaked recently when I read that Too Much Chocolate went offline not because of a creative decision but because it'd been hacked. Someone got in and sabotaged the archives. Which really sucks, and would suck if it happened to B. right now all if it exists only online. So I'm making a hard copy which will wind up being four books of roughly 350 pages each. Booksmart can get them into rough form but they still require some tweaking, so I'm in the process of editing now. It's been fun going through old posts and seeing the gradual changes over time. Once I get the raw posts printed I want to put the best ones into one volume for iPL.
That's one project. I have several others, but I'm not really ready to discuss them.
f: During your year of experimenting with B, did you come to any conclusions on what a blog does best? Or what its limits are as a format?
