It is a slow march to decay. Well thats what it feels like. I feel pretty done at the moment two surgerys in the last month and a half and another one soon. Who would have thought a tiny kidney stone would have caused so much grief, but it has.
Health is everything, if your not right you don’t function to the optimum level, I must admit life has been a bit hard with the operations and also the side effects of them. It mentally wears you down, and if you already have mental health issues it is like a double dose. I know that there are a whole lot of people out there worse off than I am, but just Oh Boy.
If you or any one you know are having mental health issues I urge you to contact some one. An few contacts are Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636 and Life Line 131114 Please reach out.
I had started putting it out there, with my photography, Slowing doing post but with the kidney stone issue slowing me down I have backed off on the this
I have also been working on the “Recovery” project and had one contact and that turned out. The guys has spoken with me and we are waiting on an occasion when he is working in Griffith to do a shoot.
Recovery is an important thing in your life, I know, myself that I am recovering on many fronts and am happy to talk about it to people in the same boat. I think this helps in building trust and empathy when we get to the storytelling part of the project.
Which brings me to the fact of the ethics of visual story telling and documentation. In current memory there has been examples of photoshopped photojournalism. I can condone this, it can and does create a false narrative. Documentary story telling is a visual record of history, Photojournalism is a visual record of history. It is often said to me that those that win write history, and that is correct, even those that lose have there own version of history. Unfortuantly both the winners and losers censor and remove images and text that doesn’t conform to there version of events.
Versions of the truth a rife in the journalism sphere, I follow a few news agencies and these a spread over a wide range of the political sphere, usually by owner preference or political beliefs and that certainly effects the editorial process. It really helps to understand this and hopefully not be locked into a set of views through which you may not be getting the whole story.
I have been guilty of this one eyed view of the world in the sports vs arts debate where I have loudly espoused the arts over sports. I was an avid sports fan. League and Union (never a football – soccer fan) as well as motor sports, I don’t know why I changed, it seems to have been an evolution of my thoughts. I know chose arts, visual mainly, but I am slowly coming to the realisation that the arts involve music, poetry, dance. I don’t always get what I see or hear or read, but you have to appreciate the effort and time involved by those that bring their vision to life.
The point that I want to make, and I think was my thinking in moving away from sport is the ‘bad boys’ The drug use and the domestic violence and general misbehavior of sports people, which I believe did not set a good example to our youth. After some considered thought I cam up with Pollock, Basquiat, and Whiteley as the bad boys of art, sure there are many more in other areas of the art, but these were visual artist that I admired, One dead from alcohol and they took an innocent life with them and the other two dead from heroin overdoses. There is no escaping that there are bad boys and girls in the arts be it visual, music or any other form of the arts. Lesson from this is that I need to get off my high horse about the evils of sports (though I wonder what the cost of sports injuries costs the taxpayer.) Live and let live.
Remember to LOVE LIFE!!