Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Metaphor?

Ironically, this was the last photograph I made in 2008. The picture prefigured my entry into a long creative funk. It was not until today, fourteen months later, that I rediscovered and processed it.

A day or so after the image was made, December 7th, my hard disk crashed and the next week was burned in the effort to restore my luckless home desktop to working condition. The web site and the blog, hosted several states away, were unaffected. My digital image catalog was safe in multiple onsite and offsite backups. Nothing significant was lost except time and my last vestige of motivation. My Christmas present that year was a faster video card and a copy of Warhammer Online (a World of Warcraft competitor); I anesthetized myself first with an online fantasy world and then, four months later, with a science fiction one (Eve).

In 2009 my cameras came out of the closet only for our vacation in the UK but otherwise gathered dust and flat batteries. I am satisfied with some of the results from the UK trip but for much of the time I was working on auto pilot, unable to fully penetrate a wall of emotional apathy. The broken computer was not the cause of this malaise, it was just the pebble I tripped over when I had already run out of energy. I was bored in my professional life and, approaching 51, past my apogee and lacking a sense of wider meaning and purpose.

This one blog post and a couple of new galleries does not guarantee that the doldrums are behind me but a renewed interest in my job and a Netflix instant queue encounter with Andy Goldsworthy have given me some hope.

See also:

Isle of Mull, 2009
Other Places, UK 2009

Andy Goldsworthy’s Rivers & Tides (2001) on Amazon or Netflix.