A LITTLE INTRODUCTION…
That’s me, Naomi. Looking all filmic in black-and-white. It’s a funny thing, being in control of a blog (that word, yuck). Not funny ha-ha but funny almost unnerving. The number of times I’ve come back to this page and edited the content that you see here is too much to count. And it’s because I’m self-conscious when I write about myself even though this is just a little intro to “me”.
MY BACKGROUND…
I graduated in French and Italian and went on to Sotheby’s Institute of Art to do an MA in the History of Photography, which has since been mistaken in general conversation as “History of Geography”, “Geography”, and the delightfully simple “Photography”.
I don’t take photographs. I’m engaged in the much more esoteric and much less vocational pursuit of talking about photographs. You can find my CV here. It contains a lot of work that does and doesn’t pertain directly to the History of Photography.
Funnily enough (again, not funny ha-ha) the course itself has been dissolved and absorbed into a general MA about Contemporary Art. If anything were to give you an indication of the popularity of Photographic studies, that could.
I’m not just a one-trick photo-pony though. In 2019, I won the Brighton Balboa Competition, and I’m a pretty damn fine dancer of Lindy, Collegiate Shag, and Slow Bal. An old soul, essentially.
WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS BLOG?
The £64 pound question.
Initially, I thought about writing because I saw other blogs and saw the incredible and widespread disregard for spelling and grammar. Not a joke. And I legit don’t care how arrogant that makes me sound (although doesn’t it really just sound like I have mad respect for the English language?)
Ultimately, I wanted to make the history of photography and analysis of photographs more accessible to people who weren’t that familiar with the arts, or theory, or whatnot. It’s since turned into something of a vanity project, which isn’t awful in itself, but I do need to find a way of making this profitable. I mean, if you have any thoughts, feel free to share.
WHY THE FRAILEST GESTURE?
I suppose it makes sense to elaborate on the title. I make absolutely no claims to high culture and could only really recite a poem if I spent five hours in a locked room repeating it over and over and over again BUT there is one poem that sticks in my mind, and that is E. E. Cummings’s Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond:
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
I hope you find something of interest within these digital walls, and if something piques your curiosity enough to merit contact, don’t hesitate to pop me an email using the address in the link.