At the Oldham Interfaith Festival of Light on Friday photographing for my day (or should that be night?) job. The evening was a celebration of light festivals in different religions, (from the top) Hindi dancers celebrating Diwali, the Christian Nativity, and Islamic Nasheed. Think I missed the Buddhist section of the programme but the pagans definitely weren't representing, despite all of the above arguably being sublimations of the solstice. Two things that I am thinking of here- firstly the different ways I could have developed my project. I've not really blogged about the book design and getting it printed and off to the binder, because, unlike childbirth there is no massive rush of hormones that instantly makes you forget the means to the end; all I can see of it at the moment is mistakes and tortured misjudgements. I could have done something very straight forward like the above; and let sequence and design ascribe meaning. I feel like I have far too much meaning with my book, like how they say a first novel always tries to bring in every experience of the writer's life to date massacring clarity in the process. Secondly, how much is easier is it to shoot digital? It takes a one hundredth of the time to get it to a point where it can be sent out into the world. I'm amongst millions having this dialogue still in my head, and there are fundamental reasons why I chose to shoot my project on film. Yet I can't help but think that I am a pretentious Luddite with this, thinking that shooting film makes me and the photograph more serious and worthy when ultimately the medium is not the message, the subject is. And to give a subject the value it deserves requires it to be disseminated as widely as possible, and to recognise that you can't control people's response to it once it is gone.
