Shooting unmotivated

It's been a while since I've been on a photo walk in Dubai, so I headed out this morning to Al Fahidi.  I haven't yet looked at the results, but I already know the image count is quite low.  Its not that I'm terribly familiar with the area and there is little left to shoot.  I simply didn't have any desire to make images.  I'm not sure why.  These days I'm feeling somewhat disengaged, and not just from photography.  I know from previous experience that one way to get past this is to get up, get out, and do.  Sitting around waiting for something to happen usually means nothing happens.  What I need is a project, but there are no voices calling just now.

I wrote the paragraph above two weeks ago and did no shooting in the days between.  Yesterday I went out to the same location and again I found myself listless and disinterested.  The only thing I can think of to do is keep trying.  Mutsumi will be leaving soon and I'll be on my own for about two months. I hope I can get back into a regular practice by then.

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Review: Franklin, Stuart. The Documentary Impulse. 2016.

Franklin, Stuart. The Documentary Impulse. 1st ed. London: Phaidon Press, 2016. Print.

The publisher’s promotional text promises insights into “how we, as humans, are driven to visually document our experiences and the world around us.”  Taken together with largely laudatory reviews, my expectations were perhaps higher than could be satisfied by a text that turned out to be a fairly standard presentation of the history of documentary photography.  While ideas are presented succinctly and in clear prose, the conclusion is something of a letdown.  The author concedes that, in effect, there may be as many documentary impulses as there are documentary photographers and that ultimately the need to document may be a manifestation of an underlying need to understand what it means to be human.  For me, the book fairly begins where it ends.