So many questions. So many questions. And no one to answer them. 

On Saturday, I walked past the building at Bristol Uni where I studied film. It was a really imperfect situation, but the problems were all practical – class sizes, a disengaged lecturer, a strike, not living in Bristol like the other students. As for the subject, I knew, instinctively, what I was doing. I flew. I could talk and just absorb everything around me. I got really great grades and was with people with who I shared a common language. The course was structured around chunks of knowledge, and there was choice to develop specific areas. 

I wonder if it’s because I’m doing a course which is founded on a fine art pedagogy that I’m struggling. I’d heard you don’t really get tutored in skills, you don’t really talk about style, you just get prompted to think critically about what you do. I just cannot connect with this course and as time goes on, I feel more and more adrift from the other students who’ve been able more or less to follow what’s been provided. 

I’ve been here before, when I studied for my creative writing MPhil. Then, too, there was a gap between what I was doing and what I was expected to be doing. Of course, this gap isn’t supposed to exist, and few will acknowledge its existence. In creative writing, the gap is about class and privilege – the only English white men who are allowed to write novels about having an ordinary life are from the professional classes, or from Oxbridge, or both. Otherwise, you have to find something exotic to write about, or are banished to genre or historic fiction. So I have been here before, and if I’d known that writing psychologically-insightful fiction about everyday, unglamorous middle class people was forbidden (which it’s not in Scotland, or the US, or Australia etc. etc.) then I’d never have even started down that road. So yet again, I’m feeling the gap, and I need to think about what’s missing. 

I’m noticing more and more of my peers are working on autobiographical and self-referential work. I’m wondering if this is a currently common theme in photography, if it’s been like this for a while, or if it’s always been a big part of it. I wouldn’t know, because my knowledge of photography is quite specific. It’s a fine and noble thing to do, and goodness knows, enough great art, whether visual or not, is highly personal – but if you don’t find yourself or your life subject matter you want to work with – if your compulsion to create art is to escape rather than encounter yourself, then it always fills me with a certain amount of awkwardness and a great deal of jealousy as people mine their pasts, their families, their relationships, their inheritance. I’ve nothing to say about mine, frankly. It’s all terribly, terribly dull. Of course, you can never escape yourself, not entirely, and your point of departure will always determine the direction of your escape, but even so, even so. 

I’m also entirely uninterested in interrogating the medium. Again, I guess it’s all about escape. When I photograph, I pour myself through the viewfinder, through the lens, and go about reinventing the world, rediscovering the world. A camera lets me perform an act of alchemy, lets me see the world afresh, lets me connect in a new way. That this little box does such a thing is nothing short of a miracle. I don’t want to think too much about how that happens. It would destroy the magic. Who needs to know the mechanisms by which vanilla acts on us? You just want that fragrant, sweet, mustiness. It might be interesting that vanilla is a kind of narcotic, but who really cares? That’s how I feel about taking a photo. Why is there such an obsession with the medium? I remember walking through the Tate Modern Shape of Light exhibition and coming to the final room which was drab and ugly and clever and I just walked through it, after being dazzled with all this play and transcendence in the previous rooms. Interrogating the medium. There’s only a point to that if you’re making work for someone who wants to interrogate the medium along with you. I’m so goddam bored of clever. 

Cemre told me that what was lacking in my work was putting criticality in my practice. My ability to make pictures is fine. There’s nothing to be fixed there. The thing is, I don’t understand what that means. I don’t understand why there needs to be any criticality visible. When I look at photos, I’m not looking for criticality, and I don’t know how to read for it anyway. When I look at a photobook, I’m usually fairly oblivious to that sort of thing, and for the most part, I don’t see the narratives, or the visual language that’s being spoken. I just see images, and they act on me, and they draw responses from me. 

This isn’t so with film. I know exactly what I’m doing there, exactly what can be achieved with an edit, with sound, with carefully written voiceover. I know what I want to say and I know how to say it. It’s informed by a huge amount of research and thought and it’s all there in the film. This doesn’t happen with my photography, as in it’s not there in the photographs: you need a bit of written context to support that. And without conversation, and thorough and regular feedback, I’m not going to be able to put the criticality in my work. These are not things that have been available to me on this course, and it’s not something that comes intuitively to me as it does with film. 

And so, unsurprisingly, I’m back with video, remembering how I know exactly what I’m doing. And I wonder just how this is now going to work. I suspect that when I hear people talk about photographers also working in video, it’s actually, mostly, just a bit of an add-on, a side-show, just like photography is for filmmakers. Even if they get really good at it. Maybe this is why I’m struggling to get any advice. It’s all – yes, such and such also works in video. And that’s it. 

It’s all driving me nuts, it really is. I’m hardly taking any photos. I just look out at the world and think, it’s all been taken before, it’s just another fucking tree, who cares, so what. WHERE’S THE GODDAM CRITICALITY IN THAT BARK????