Month: August 2021

Reflecting some more on the idea of needing a break, I find myself thinking about the fact that this year — thanks, in no small part, to the new freelancing gigs I’m taking after losing the permanent THR position — I’ve been dealing with relatively longterm projects for the first time.

In my past, while I’ve had gigs that have continued for some time, they’ve generally been centered around the idea that I’m handing in work on a regular basis and moving on. Even on previous projects that I’d considered “longterm” — which seems almost embarrassing, looking back, because they’ve lasted a month or so at the most — there’s been a regular back-and-forth between myself and editors or collaborators that allowed me to feel as if I’ve reached some kind of ending point, or at least a milestone.

That’s not really been the case this time around; there’s the mystery secret project that’s slowly continuing in the background, that I’d hoped to have finished last week but reality — and other gigs — got in the way, and then there’s a second longterm project that’s been in the works in some degree or another since… February, I think? Maybe early March…? A significant period of time, nonetheless.

Admittedly, for much of that time, it was “in the works” in the sense of, “occasionally I’d think a little about it and then move on.” It didn’t become more of an actively-work-on thing until a month or so ago, when the deadline started looming large in my imagination. This meant that I spent a large period of last month working primarily on the two longform projects, and not having many — enough — short term things happening. I was, for want of a better way to put it, missing the relief that comes from submitting a piece and thinking, well, now I can move on.

The absence of that sense of closure, or that moment of “Thank fuck, I can put that particular mental box away” for a month, might have contributed to my burnout last month, looking back. Or perhaps I’m just overthinking things, now that the first draft of that second project has been submitted and I feel as if I can move on, at least until the inevitable request for rewrites.

I’ve been thinking about lost iconography of the past recently.

It started when looking back over GMT 2000 for the first time in at least a decade or so; it’s a collection of photography from the Magnum agency taking in multiple locations across the U.K. on the last week of the 20th century, and it’s very much a snapshot — pun only half intended — of the cultural zeitgeist of that curious moment in time. Looking at that got me nostalgic not only for that era and those places, but also for the “trash photography” I used to indulge in when I was in art school and just fresh out of it.

The term has been borrowed by others and abandoned by all, now, but “trash photography” for a brief moment of the 1990s was intentionally throwaway, pop photography — done quickly and cheaply, and with subjects that were intentionally lowbrow or accidental: graffiti on walls, branding in store windows, that kind of thing. It’s an aesthetic that I still enjoy, even if iPhones and smartphones of all makes have tended to transform just what counts as throwaway photos in this day and age. (Is everything trash photography now? There’s an argument to be made that it is, far more than it’s “content.” Alas.)

Thinking about this reminded me of the photographic process that was: shooting photos on film, and then having to have that developed into negatives and the finished prints. I’d take them to a local store to handle, and because so many of them were out of focus or blurry — usually intentionally so, but not always, I admit — they’d be returned to me with a sticker attached explaining that there was something wrong with the image.

That sticker or ones like it because, in its own right, an iconic image to an entire generation, I think: an editorial comment when least expected, a judgment that seemed to misunderstand the intent of what people were trying to do. The aesthetics of those stickers had their own messages, their own meanings, and they became visual objects in their own right.

But those stickers don’t exist anymore in the popular consciousness, because who gets photos developed these days? There’s no outside voice letting you know that you weren’t in focus, or that the lighting was too low, or whatever; you just get whatever you see on your screen.

It feels like a sad thing, for those stickers to be consigned to history. It feels like a loss, even though I could not come up with a coherent, aesthetic argument as to why that’s actually the case. This might just be what nostalgia is, I guess.

It’s perhaps telling that it took me until switching off my laptop last Friday, and finally stopping thinking about work as continuously as I had been doing, to realize just how exhausted I actually was.

I knew something was wrong, of course; I knew that I was struggling to meet deadlines and juggle the various bits of work that were hanging over my head across the last week or two, and I knew that this blog was suffering even more — after all, it’s the easiest thing to put to one side when I’m trying to make sure that I’m taking care of the various bits of business that are actually, you know, business.

Despite what old GI Joe cartoons claimed, though, knowing isn’t really half the battle — even though I was all too aware that everything wasn’t really going as it normally did, and that I was finding it harder to actually do what traditionally came easier, if not easily, my thought process pretty much stopped there: I got to the edge of “something’s probably wrong” and never managed to progress to “I wonder what it is?”

Instead, I just pushed myself through the days by force of will as much as anything else, making sure that I was doing at least the bare minimum and hoping that things would get better magically, somehow. Maybe I was just having an off day. Maybe I was just having, like, a couple of weeks of off days. That’s not impossible, right?

Weirdly, it was the most obvious leap of logic that put everything into focus for me last week: for pet-related reasons, I’d been sleeping like shit for three or four nights by that point, and as I finished work for that day, I thought to myself, I’m really tired. And then I thought, wait, what if I’m not just sleepy tired, but actually, really and properly exhausted tired? What if I’m burned out and need a break?

That broke a mental dam, somehow, and I almost immediately started feeling better — it was as if just naming the problem was the start of recovering from it. A weekend of doing as little as possible (but sleeping well for the first time in weeks, honestly) later, and things seem like maybe they’re on an upswing again. It’s not the rest that I need, not yet, but maybe it’s a start. Maybe that’s enough for now.