Every month I open my Chest of Creativity to pick out something new. An art or artist I focus on, through reading, listening to music, loking at photos, travels, writing..... In December I picked up Alphonse Mucha, read the book I bought in Prague, looked at photos, found the 2010 calendar I bought back in November which I will hang up today.
I always have a list of artists, writers, musicians, arts I want to learn more about, and when one month comes to its end it is always difficult to decide which path to walk next.
For some time I decided to focus on old Norwegian knitting in January. I picked out a few books from my shelves about the theme, I even decided to start knitting Selbuvotter (Selbu mittens) using old patterns.
Then suddenly I changed my mind.
January will be my month of photographing.
I am an amatur, but I love to shoot photos. Either my 3 years old Nikon D50 or my small Canon Digital Ixus 870 IS , sometimes both, are following me everywhere.......now it might be time to start to learn to play more with the thousands of photos I have saved on the two harddisks we have for photos.
My main focus will not be my own photos though, but to learn more about photographing as an art form. Starting with the three books I have; the photography reader with editor liz wells, Susan Sontag's On Photography and Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, I have some great literature to start with. And somewhere down in the basement I have an old leatherbound album with old portraits, many of them of old family members. These brown old photos will be my pieces of art in January 2010.
Photos: from The Blue Garden yesterday
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Afternote:
For many years I've run a yahoo group called Armchairtrevelling. There we used to discuss one artist a month. For some time now the group has been almost asleep. May be it is time to wake it up? May be Armchairtravelling is a place to talk about photographing? Are you interested in joining?
