Egypt won. Now that this bit is out of the way, let’s get to the other stuff.
I had been working on a redesign of the website over the past few weeks. Like most projects we set out for ourselves, it took longer and involved more effort than I had anticipated, despite my complete reliance on AI for coding help.
The last time I designed the website, if I can really use the term design, would probably have been around 2015. I question the use of the term because all I had done was find a good looking WordPress theme, purchased it – I had been using free themes till then – and that was it. At the time, I was working as a photographer and had a fairly successful practice, working with corporate brands and nonprofits. The website stayed that way for many years after that, barring minor changes to the homepage where I would change the cover photograph or add posts and projects. Until I went to do a Master’s at LSE after which I decided to do a career pivot into consulting.
Out went all the photographs and photo essays. I did it because I wasn’t sure what to do with the website now that I wasn’t actively adding any images or had any new material that I wanted to showcase. Plus I had probably started taking my written output a bit too seriously. Conscious about putting only that out there which is the best and most beautiful form of the written word that I can produce.
Trust me, I still believe in this as much as I did then. Most writing in the online space is crap. There’s a good reason why AI-generated writing wasn’t any good to begin with, even if it might be improving with successive models. I simply didn’t want to add to the crap. But then where do you draw the line? Going silent may not be the best answer, even if there are excellent arguments in favour of it.
Thinking about it now, I do wonder if that was the right thing to do. To get rid of all the photo galleries. It wasn’t the first time I had done that either. A couple of years prior to that, sometime around 2012 or 2013, I had done something similar. Between 2008 and 2012, I wrote for a bunch of magazines on music and culture. At the peak of it, I had a weekly column in a newspaper and a monthly column in a magazine where I wrote new music reviews. For the latter, I must have written a few hundred album reviews, which I shared on this website as well. When my photography practice started picking up, I wanted to put my photography work front and centre to not confuse potential clients. That’s the widely accepted and generously distributed wisdom when it comes to personal work.
Only put out there what you want to be known for. Keep the focus narrow.
How does someone who has done more than a few things, some of which could be decent enough to showcase, respond to these nuggets?
In my case, I deleted all those hundreds of music reviews from my website.
I am certain I would cringe reading most of them today. Much like I do when I come across a note I had written to myself in some notebook years ago as twenty something fresh at the start of his professional career. And yet sometimes, there will be that note which brings a smile or a rush of memory from a time when life was in a different kind of a flux. Regardless, that was a part of me at a different time in my life, when I may well have been a very different, probably unidentifiable version of what I am today. Today, I would very much have liked to have access to that part of me, even if it meant obscuring it from public view.
(I’m not even going to talk about all those photographs I deleted from my archive because I felt they were just garbage.)
Yet again, where do we draw the line in keeping a record of our work, especially any creative output? For instance, my younger one constantly keeps making drawings and colourings. Almost every single day, and more than a couple of them at times. We keep a few, and most end up in the recycling. Am I the best judge of what to retain for the future, especially in case she grows up to pursue a creative practice? For that matter, are we the best judges of our own work? To know what to keep and what to discard.
Coming back to this website, in its newly redesigned format. For once, it doesn’t talk about only one thing that I do. So there again, I thumb my nose at conventional wisdom, at how I should define myself. The website still doesn’t talk about everything that I am doing or would like to do, but I think that’s a good start. I may not be as good at everything that I do. Some things, better. Others, worse. As long as they are better than the majority of what’s out there, I can make a living of them. For those that aren’t, I do them for the sheer joy that they bring me. Just the way that I like to run. For the simple feeling of putting on your shoes, being out in the open against the elements, taking one step at a time to reach the end. That’s just life, right?