Sending a Message in a bottle (A rich bottle of whine)
In the back of my head every time I write in my photo diary blog, I ask myself why I am writing and posting things online which are quite personal?
To a certain degree it feels good to write your thoughts – I take lots of photos and it gives me the opportunity to post them and see them and document the story that goes with them. (The other option is to forget about them and leave them in my hard drive).
This is a big reason I love to shoot with film. Aside from film looking amazing, it is tangible and I don’t have to process it myself. So posting pictures serves to keep track and have something I can see or view like an album.
Just before I started documenting my photographic journey, I would keep a diary, mainly as a way to keep check of my thoughts. This has now stopped and the posts I publish have taken over.
It’s as if I’m writing to myself and on a very tiny level I’m aware that whatever I post can be available to other people, but it almost feels as if it’s just me.
This got me thinking about a film I once saw, Message In a Bottle. It was a love story about a guy struggling with the loss of his partner who would write her letters and place them in a bottle and throw them out to sea, knowing that they would never reach the person he loved but it helped him cope with his feelings. I suppose this is how I feel about my posts, just things and thoughts that I write and cast out to sea.
When I write something that feels relatively private and personal, it does almost as if I’m writing to myself and it feels good to get it out. I have a lot of thoughts and ideas buzzing around, many emotions which I’m probably not quite brave enough to write as truthfully as I would if they were going into my private diary. But looking back at my posts they are pretty much from the gut and my pictures are definitely my story.
The blogs are good for me in this juncture of my life. Yes, I’m on Facebook but only sparodically and am close to closing my account down permanently. I used to enjoy Instagram but I find it time consuming and hate that I keep checking the app to see if I’ve got any ‘likes’ and also find myself liking things I don’t really like so that’s also on the verge of heading to my trash box.
As a visual person I love Pinterest. I don’t care about their followers but I love it when I get a photographic idea or project, I can create a board almost as research. I’m about to embark on documenting an over 60s five-a-side football group and not having done much in the way of sports photography, so I can create a board with photos I like that have been done in this genre. I’m a relative newcomer to Pinterest but definitely love it.
I will continue to write and send my messages in a bottle and just throw them out there into the big sea – and watch the waves.
On the subject of Bottles, I thought it only appropriate to share a few Collages created by Valentino Monticello my dad all created with wine labels :
