Type Baby

I've never entertained the thought of putting a 'watermark' on my photos until, well, just now.  Firstly, I'm just monkeying around with the camera, having fun.  There are quadzillions of people who take their photography seriously and who are extremely talented.  I see it on Flickr every day as I cruise through my contacts' photos.  These are people who know what the buttons on their camera can do.  Me, honestly, not so much.

I've also not wanted to watermark anything because it would mean, to me if no one else, that I thought I was fancy, which could lead me to start taking the whole thing seriously.  And I really just want it to be fun.  An escape of sorts.  Goofing around, for sure.  But then yesterday, I googled myself, something I don't do that often since it can be damaging to my fragile and dainty little ego, and lo and behold, people are posting my photos.  Weird.  Cool.  And it seems like I'm being linked back to, so I don't have a huge problem with that.  (If they hadn't linked back to me and credited me, I guess I'd never have found them).  So, I don't know if I'll stick to putting my name on my photos.  Maybe some of them?  It's an experiment.

Well, speaking of fun.  I've been thinking about the lines in the above photo for a while, and finally had some time to do the typing.  Took me a few tries.  Here it is on Flickr if you want to see it in a different format.

Okay, so it's interesting, other people linking to, maybe even copying your photos, on the web.  Partly it doesn't matter to me that much because I have no hope of making money off of them, you know?  And partly because my artistic ego is more tied to my writing.  Not that I'm making a mint off of that either, ha.  As my three faithful readers of this blog know, the book I'm hoping to get published is an experimental-ish novel about the possibility of a woman art forger.  I'm deep into the writing of another book by now, but it's interesting how it's impossible to shake the previous obsession.  All those years of thinking about what it means to fake something, what a fake is, and how this affects us as viewers, as consumers.  Hmmm.

Last week I received a few books, one that I'd had on order for a while - A Closer Look: Deceptions & Discoveries.  (This is the catalogue for the show at the National Gallery in London last fall).   Then a book called, Copy, Archive, Signature: A conversation on photography, Jacques Derrida.  Haven't had enough time to spend with that at all lately.  The last is a copy of "in praise of copying" by Marcus Boon.  If you look at the bottom lefthand side of the page on the Harvard site, you can see that it's possible to download the book for free.  And I did contemplate doing that.  In the end, somehow that felt just too weird.  And also, the offering of the thing for free, made me want to pay for it even more.

So, that's all I'll say about books I don't have the time to read.  Bad habit, right. But the three of them stacked together are my small offering to the gods of publishing.  My book would look very nice intermingled.  Just sayin'.