I've had a few interesting conversations this week around self-publishing in general and blogging in particular. A coworker and fellow blogger shared my sentiments about blogs: sometimes it's just so difficult to keep the momentum going.

The question I've been playing with – and relating to the relative difficulty of maintaining a serious blog – is, what validates self-published work? Before the internet allowed us infinite possibilities for self-promotion, creative work passed through a limited number of routes to reach the public eye. Written work like mine would need to be picked up by a newspaper, a magazine, a publishing company even.

Now, with a truly global market for ideas, self-promotion has become an art in its own right. Words + Images exists not because an editor thought it worth printing, but because I imagined it and created a home for it and made a commitment to complete one post weekly, no later than Tuesday morning. Promotion, visibility, recognition, and success are not guaranteed, and standard rules of advertising do not apply. Instead, underground phenomena spread virally, promoted by millions of Gen Y'ers and Millenials vying to be the first to discover the newest cool thing on the internet.

Is this what validates self-published work? Trying to get one's work seen – whether in a gallery, magazine, book, etc. -- in traditional media can be incredibly demoralizing, and self-publishing can at times feel like an easy way out. Lately I'm inclined to feel otherwise. Keeping this blog going is a labor of love and it relies entirely on my own personal motivation to keep making the time commitment week after week. Not only have I continued to write for Words + Images, but I have spent many a weekend correcting bugs, solving emergencies, and attending to other overhead.

I'm of a mind that self-publishing and the internet have provided the next evolution of “art for art's sake.” With it we see a liberation of the artist, and a new kind of dedication: one that doesn't rely on acceptance letters or royalties or good reviews, but solely on the creator's will to keep it alive even when it seems no one is looking.

Between tonight's and last week's posts I bought a new notebook. As often happens, a flurry of writing followed this acquisition. Since you asked, I succumbed to the Moleskine black, 3.5 x 5.5” cahier squared notebook. This was after I walked down St. Paul Street to discover the stationary store had closed, forcing me to trudge over to the Barnes & Noble for a greeting card but reassuring me that at least I wouldn't end up spending more money on notebooks.

At any rate, I have been using my new, purse-sized graph paper companion to keep notes about this blog and my recent photography. With this heightened awareness I was actually surprised by how often these images cross my mind on a normal day. When I write my fleeting ideas down, my next fleeting idea can build upon what I recorded in my notebook instead of starting from scratch again.

I have been able to gather a healthy number of preliminary thoughts from my journal around how my writing will interact with the photos when I show them. I have also given thought to my context as a woman recording and making sacred the everyday workings of the home. What does this mean? Am I necessarily communicating with other women, or just documenting my own unique experience in a domestic space?

Interestingly, I also dusted off three very different books I happen to have in my personal library. All of these books came to me by complete chance: caught my eye in the bookstore, turned up at the book wagon when I volunteered at the local arts festival back home, and snatched from my great-grandmother's house, respectively.

• What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us (2000)
  

• The Feminine Mystique (1963)

• Womanhood and Marriage (1922)
  

In addition to my own photographing and writing and considering subtle implications (see below), I think I'll give these a read (or re-read). Who knows, maybe I'll get some ideas. Maybe I'll seek out some other books tangentially related to my images. Feel free to throw some books my way in the comments.

Every once in a while, I <3 Photograph shows me something that piques my interest.  The other day it brought to my attention the work of Erik Boker—specifically his "Product Dissections" series.  I found it interesting to compare his study of toothpastes to my own household photography.  While Boker has a lot to say about how we relate to the natural/unnatural as Consumer, I'm concerned in this case with his analysis of the "seemingly insignificant" objects we interact with on a daily basis. 

There aren't a whole lot of parallels between the work, but I find these toothpastes a little grotesque (perhaps a statement on our idea of "hygiene?") and wholly fascinating to look at. I think it was beneficial to my own process to look at his disconcerting critique of our everyday vs. my drive to capture and record household details as almost sacred.

Boker's stark, utilitarian images got me thinking about something else, too: can my images stand on their own?  How important is it that each and every photo be an excellent image when taken out of context? From the beginning, I have struggled with the fact that these images lack some of the boldness of my previous work. My nighttime photos, for example, caused me a lot of discomfort in their making. I was breathless with fear, trespassing alone at night and standing still for 30-second exposures. In every case I was experiencing fright or awe at crumbing shipyards, brightly lit industrial landscapes, skeletal fuel pumps from another decade.

My current work reminds me of the later images in my Reclamation series. At some point the photos calmed down and began quietly documenting the specifics of decay and abandonment: a weathered string of party lights, a faded plastic beach basket full of pine cones and dirt and old jump ropes. That careful documentation, the act of preserving and honoring a particular moment in time, is what I want to go for in this next body of images.

This time, though, I'm examining activity and life, light and color, a home inhabited. It still troubles me that there is no personal risk inherent in these photographs, but I think there is real opportunity there to create something very thoughtful that reads like a book: an exploration of the intersection between career, art work, household. Woman, wife, artist.

In the same breath this is home, simple and overlooked, as seen through the eye of a photographer and writer. We string together words and images constantly, even at home when it looks like we are simply collapsed on the couch after a long day. There is always something to say about the way the screen door frames the sycamore tree out front, the quality of light across the floorboards, the particular arrangement of a stack of library books on the table.

I love my house.  When I wake up in the morning or come home from work in the afternoon, I take note of the color palette, the furniture, the way the light shines through from one end to the other, and I give some thanks for this living space (and the wonderful husband and cat I share it with).

Recently I've been inspired to capture small details of my life in the physical world.  My success was limited at first, or so I thought. The images didn't seem to capture the essence of what I saw. They didn't “pop” for me. Looking at them objectively I appreciate these images in their own right, but I was disappointed when I first shot them:

As I left the scene behind and moved in closer to examine what was actually striking me, I came out with some far more satisfying images. Generally speaking, if I'm not happy with an image it means I wasn't close enough.

After moving in on my subjects, I took a few steps back again and came upon this nice little shot:

As much as I'm enjoying collecting these little snippets of domestic life, I'm coming up with some questions in my mind.  I'm afraid I should be doing more.  My goal has always been for my work to be contemplative and multi-faceted, something I could write multiple essays about if I was so inclined.  I know I have the intellect, so what am I waiting for?  It's been too long since I worked on a serious body of work.  Creating the handmade book to show my best Reclamation pieces was such a fulfilling experience.  The photos were fabulous and I was very pleased with the short creative non-fiction I included in the finished piece.  As I settle into a home that is once again inspiring, I feel very ready to get my head into a new (or renewed) project. 

Then again, maybe I should take my attraction to these images as a sign and give them a little more thought. I can see a very intimate collection of photos coming out of this, and I'd like to do a bit of writing to go with them.

We'll see where it goes in the coming weeks, especially as fall and winter begin to set in. I find the cold months to be my most prolific time in terms of writing and photography production, and I'm very excited to see where my inspiration will take me in this new home and new city.

If you'd like to follow along, I've started a new Flickr set, Domesticity, which I'll be populating with images as I get them.

I'm happy to report, Words + Images seems to be fully transitioned to its new home.  Naturally there were a few glitches, so if you discover one I don't know about, please let me know!

This weekend I will be in the process of moving Words + Images to a new hosting company.  Ideally the whole thing should go off without a hitch, but we'll see.

I fully intend to have the move completed by Monday night, when I usually upload the weekly post.  Until then, beware of stormy seas!

The promised (and delayed) weekly post from last week still sits in a file on my computer.  Unfortunately, I am dealing with some technical problems with my web hosting company and cannot seem to add images to entries anymore.  While that gets sorted out, I am going to share some of my regular online reading.  I own a couple good photo books, but the internet is by far my biggest source of mental nutrition.  Here are some things hanging out in my Google Reader right now:

• Women in Photography is half-blog, half-gallery.  A new "solo exhibition" showcasing a female photographer opens each month.  Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis and the site is curated by Amy Elkins and Cara Phillips.  There are a lot of women doing thought-provoking photographic work, and these two have chosen some great images in the past few months the site has been in existence.
• I find that I Heart Photograph is a little hit or miss: sometimes I find a real gem, sometimes I fail to be inspired by this site that posts copious amounts of photographic finds.  However, I keep the RSS feed on my radar just for those gems it unearths from time to time, such as
• Crashed Cars of Kuwait.  This documentation of car wrecks in Kuwait is eerie, unsettling, and wholly engaging.  I think all our eyes experience a magnetic tug toward mangled vehicles like this because it's so easy to imagine ourselves in the drivers' place, and that is the spirit in which this photographer documents the wrecks.  He acknowledges there is a certain morbid insanity to it but treats the subject with enough reverence to make this a stunning body of work.  In later images he ventures into night scenes, a realm near and dear to my heart.
• Friends' blogs are always in my feed, and I'm always up for a few tales from the entertainment world via Hungry Filmmaker, which has a little bit of everything: job stories, a touching video marriage proposal, tips on working with limited resources, film theory, and some interesting thoughts on copyright/intellectual property in the digital age.  Oh, I admit it, I also read this because secretly I want to work with film but haven't been able to come up with a good enough idea quite yet.  I live (and struggle) vicariously.
  
• Okay, so I haven't been keeping up with Strobist at all because I haven't been doing much off-camera lighting.  BUT.  I feel I need to bring this blog to light because it a.) is written by a Baltimore Sun photojournalist, b.) has an excellent community of active readers and c.) does a great job of teaching professional lighting on a budget.  There is a huge wealth of tips for making highly effective lighting gear on the cheap, with a focus of lighting off-camera using groups of remotely triggered Speedlights.  If I were a photo professor, I would list this site as a required text.

What is on your reading list?  Feel free to send me your favorite online food for thought in the comments.