Casting Myself Adrift on the Interweb.

Today, I’m launching my own website.

It will display my photographic work, eventually going back into the mist-shrouded reaches of the past, back to 1980 or so. I am giving it a home on the interweb and setting it free, just to see what happens. I honestly have no expectations, nor will I speculate on the outcome.

There is noting earthshaking or monumental about this event. Even though I’m not exactly an early adopter of new technology, the web is certainly old enough that even someone like me, just entering the pre-fossil stage of my life, would be able to figure out how to use it.

What’s surprising is that I’m opening up my work to the world, maybe even the universe if there are aliens monitoring our internet traffic. That part doesn’t fit well with my personality, as those who know me well could easily attest. I’ll spare you the armchair physchoanalysis if you’ll just accept that as true and we can move on.

It was so difficult going through my thousands of images and trying to organize them in some way. And that’s just the digital files. I have thousands of negative and slides that I haven’t even touched yet. I’m not sure I like the way things are laid out now, but it’s a start. I could spend the rest of my life waiting for things to be perfect (a serous personal flaw that I’ve suffered from for at least the last 45 years), but that would defeat the purpose. My images need to be seen or else they will always be something smaller than what I’d hoped they’d be.

I’ve often looked forward to this with a mixture of excitement and pure horror. Now that the time is here, it’s mostly horror. I’m not so much worried that my work will be despised and ridiculed, I’m worried that it will be ignored. I know I have things to say, and the ability to say them, I just don’t know if they’re things that anyone besides me would notice or care about.

Below, I have included a photo of a bust of Burton K Wheeler, a former US Senator from Montana who died in 1975, for no reason other than to lend a regal appearance to this announcement. I don’t look half this impressive.

Enjoy. Feedback is always welcome.

RXM

The Late Burton K. Wheeler (©2007 by Richard X. Moore)