After a new year break I've managed to be the only one of my housemates to come back to Bournemouth so early, perfect excuse to pick up with my essay. Surrounded by 5 different open books and about 10 tabs of online research I found a brilliant piece in Robert Adams' Why People Photograph, as he discusses artists' reluctance to write about their own work:
'...photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision. Other ways are relatively imprecise and incomplete. Why try the other ways? As Charles Demuth said, "I have been urged . . . to write about my paintings . . . Why? Haven't I, in a way, painted them?" Or as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, "You want me to say it worse?"'
An extract which I feel may not excuse my inability to explain my work, but it sure does give a good reason not to. But it's certainly a target of mine to work on. My photography has always failed academically due to my reluctance to discuss and explain the thought processes in my work and my general omittance of them.
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