In the Beginning

There was a photographer (Brent Bennett) whose work I would continually return to for inspiration. Unfortunately, it was on a slow server and it was tedious to iterate through the images. I eventually had the bright idea to download his images so that I could more quickly peruse them offline, and this act of collecting later expanded to include any image I thought was visually interesting. So began my private collection of jpg files of which I now have many thousands. I generally collect with a bias to certain formal qualities rather than subject.

I later decided it was time to return to the Internet the images it had given me, and hence this blog/magazine/curatorial project came into existence. Hopefully this blog exposes some of the amazing images and photographers which are sometimes difficult to discover within the depths of the Internet (at least this was my experience, starting out).

The exercise of selectively collecting the images of these photographers generates a specific view of their practice which is skewed to my own interpretation and is based upon how I would like to remember their practice. In a sense this blog is a collection of “snapshots” I am using for memory, much like a set of vacation or holiday pictures, and are equally as simultaneously authentic and inauthentic to that type of action (a theme found through my other work). I also find this work greatly useful in improving my own répertoire of visual tools.