Keeping the viewer guessing

 As in literature, one of the most important features of a strong photographic narrative is there must be something missing. There must be a central lack or mystery that keeps the viewer guessing. Literary theorist Worlfgang Iser describes this "place of indeterminacy" in narrative as the productive meeting point of text and reader, where readers are provoked to fill in the blank themselves. In a single still image, a gap is necessary to produce the movement that creates a story rather than just a scene. Sometimes we may formulate the gap as a question: What is going on? What is tin that briefcase? What is that woman feeling? In other images, it is more of a lack of resolution that brings an image to life, an ambiguity that keeps the image oscillating.

 - Lucy Soutter
Showing and Telling: Narrative Picture to Parafictions

On Being 55 (or probably any age, really...)

When I look at other people who are 55, I'm struck by just how much older than me they look.

Until I glance in the mirror...

A State of Mind

When I'm not drowning in deep depression,
or wrestling with high anxiety,
or bone-achingly weary with mental exhaustion,
or overwhelmed with existential angst, unable to stop staring into an eternal pit of of the darkest nihilism,
then I find I'm actually quite optimistic...

Time and Energy

And then the programme crashed, just as I was putting the finishing touches to a project that I'd been working on for 3 hours, but because of the CFS had effectively taken me 2 days of scraping together bits here and bits there.

I didn't have the time or energy to do it again.

Other things had far more priority and I probably shouldn't have been wasting my precious resources on it anyway.

It wasn't an important thing, just a bit of trivial fun.

But still I wept.

I'm not OK about not feeling OK

Stop telling me that it's OK not to feel OK!

The whole thing about not feeling OK is that I'm not OK with it!

I get what you're trying to say is that under the current circumstances it's perfectly natural to not feel OK, and there's no need to add extra guilt, or beat myself up about not being OK.

But I'm still not OK with not being OK!

Not being OK feels like a crock of shit, and I don't like it – it's not OK!

I want to stop feeling I'm not OK.

And you telling me it's OK not to feel OK isn't making me feel any better.

It might be making YOU feel better to tell me it's OK not to feel OK, because it helps distract you from not feeling OK.

But it's only making me feel even more useless that I can't be OK with not feeling OK.

I just want to stop feeling not OK.

Payment

I love the eating, so much.

It's the awful physical and emotional feelings of having overdone it afterwards I really hate.

Deceit

Even after 30 years together, I think we both harbour a suspicion that after having fallen madly in love, we had to somehow trick the other one into to feeling the same way, and we each live in fear that sooner or later the other is going to notice they were deceived and realise we are not worthy of their love after all...

Decisions, decisions...

...and then I had to abandon the ironing after the first shirt, because I realised I'd been staring at the pile for over 5 minutes and felt incapable of deciding what order to do them in...

The world is not what you thought

One of those conversations where, in a moment of awareness, the world suddenly turns and you realise that every memory of who you are, what you did, and why you did it, is now going to have to be re-written...

...again.

My Journey to a Parallel Universe

A true story...

When I was in my mid to late 20s, I drove a Lada.

Not the most fashionable of cars - in fact it was about as fashionable as my mullet - but it got us from A to B, most of the time.

Mine was light brown in colour.

I always knew it was light brown, so when I went to Halfords to buy some paint to cover up some of the scratches and dents, I bought the light brown Lada paint.

Then when I got home and went to apply the paint, my Lada was inexplicably cream, and had always been cream coloured.



The only explanation I have ever been able to come up with is, in that moment I slipped into a parallel universe where everything was the same except the colour of my Lada.

I sometimes wonder how the life of the Kim from the parallel universe I swapped places with, who bought cream paint at Halfords and suddenly found his Lada was brown, has turned out...