The discovery that there is a photographic counterpart to writer’s block has been uncomfortable. I should have seen it coming, however. Since my interest in photography reawakened, probably around 2015, there has been a continual moving forward of things to discover, new things to photograph made possible by new technologies and personal investigations of the world. It has been a thrilling ride and made life much more fulfilling. But Hidden Corners has felt like the apex of this: it was the culmination of my discoveries of the Heaths (having exhausted my fascination of the M5 bridge) and the combination of an excellent camera with an excellent lens. It has been hard for me to see where I might go from here: I’ve certainly come to the terminus of buying kit (for financial reasons, apart from anything else) and the pandemic and the perennial practical and financial constraints of domestic life, tied with the insecurity of the pandemic have made it regrettably unlikely that I can pursue the grand projects I would like at present – I will most likely have to wait for my daughter to leave home and for a vaccine to emerge before I can hop around the country photographing literary woods and famous commons.

The pandemic has put my perennial constraints on those who previously didn’t have them. It’s been interesting watching how peers and professionals have responded: there has been a turn to local communities, personal and domestic lives, autobiographies and evaluations of identities, a return to older ways of working more connected with fine art. I have not followed this trajectory inwards and into the immediate backgrounds to daily life; daily life is something I have wanted to escape my whole life, harking right back to the intense loneliness and emotionally and intellectually crushing family environment in which I spent my childhood, and which has its exact counterpart in a marriage from which, for the sake of my daughter, I cannot extricate myself for some time yet. That I have never attempted, let alone succeeded at, ending my life has been seen as remarkable by a number of mental health practitioners: I have never had the circumstances conducive to happiness or personal growth.

Since abandoning writing fiction, my drive to create work, whether moving or still photography, has been all about looking outward to strike new experiences and encounters, or where it is more introspective, to find a space to encounter myself anew, free from the deadening dullness of my isolated quotidian routines. I interrogated my daily life and my personal histories in my fiction, and it made for very sad, unloveable work, unattractive to others and painful to write. The reason I love photography, and filmmaking, is it makes me look outwards and that gives me the  courage and inspiration to want to live. My writing is something intimately tied with despair and the fundamental despair that leads to suicidal thoughts (more of an occupational hazard amongst fiction writers than in any other art form, it should be notes). My writing is, in the parlance of the mental health professions, essentially a form of rumination.

I’ve been told, often, during this course that making beautiful photos isn’t enough, and this is something I can see to be true, painful though that is. After all, the world is awash with beautiful photos, and doesn’t really need any more. Beautiful photos need to be in the service of something else, something more compelling, and now I have come to understand this, I feel considerable pressure to find that something more. Photography, whether still or moving, is a medium of recording: you cannot take photos of things you understand in words, or images you see in your head (unless maybe you work in abstracts and have the technical proficiency and resources to do so). And so one is limited by the opportunities and experiences available. In my case, the limitations are extreme, and so I must go wherever there is a glimmer of curiosity; escape through whatever crack in the quotidian opens up.

This is why the return to video. The possibilities of the a7siii are startling and overwhelming, and I find this is what I want to invest my energies exploring. I am excited, curious to see what I can create, and how I can engage with and look out at the world anew. And, frankly, trying to anchor this experience in the context of photography, with its philosophical foundation in fine art, is hugely frustrating. Having investigated and spoke with people, it seems that video, in the context of photography, becomes this thing called ‘video art’ which is something I just cannot relate to. I don’t like the conversations around it – they are too abstract, solipsistically obsessed with the medium itself – and for the most part, I don’t like the work I’m encountering. Much of it I think is awful. I have no curiosity about this and that’s why, however much I try, I can’t focus on texts about it. It also seems rather pointless investigating installations. I’ve only ever seen one or two, and isn’t it rather defeating the object of the exercise only ever encountering them now through words?

I think I could end up wasting time here. Again. And I should follow my intuitive curiosity. And go back, yet again, to that Blake quote which really I should get tattooed on my arm:

‘The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow’.

I should just follow my intuition. Make the film I know I want to: make another essay film, as I know I want to, explore the enclosures in the winter as I know I want to (autumn is perhaps too beautiful, too distractingly so). Completely scrap the tuition from Falmouth, which I suspect cannot help me, as I regrettably find I want to. And completely ignore the fact that what I make gets assessed. If there’s no difference between video and stills photography, if, as Colin says, those genres are uninteresting and pointless, then nothing should be stopping me anyway.