29 October 2000
Sun*day afternoon in Caffè Nero, London
After seeing the Corrine Day: Diary exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery on Great Newport Street in SoHo, London. I realize that each time I see a new photographer’s work I mentally sort my boxes of prints and find a new vision for them. I shuffle them and toss them, and new ones turn up as “good photos” or “showable” based on new criteria introduced by the exhibition. So after seeing Corrine’s show, I find I don’t have to disregard my photos that are composed or exposed awkwardly, as long as the photo is emotionally (or otherwise) impacting.
and I also think of my photos as a visual diary, the initial impulse behind picking up a camera was to remember people who marked my life. It came out of that feeling of transparence, temporariness, the variedness (of existence) (dare I add) and a very personal need to see them again in some way.
I am obsessed with the diary. When I hear the word diary, I want to write in my own. I love artworks (like Louise Bourgeois) that are diary-like, the journals and diaries of famous authors… scraps, sundry, the ongoing pinning down of things in order to grasp, that slipping away, that loss and discovery, the endless variety of What Is This Really All About in different letters and languages, privacy , dormancy, the Private Archive, the documents one selects to cherish, that illustrate one’s life. And I love time away from my archive, because I create more. When I get stuck I write / create through it rather than look at documents from the archive and think: How did I ever come up with that?