Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Looking at pictures - Laguna Gloria, Austin, 2000

Artists sometimes claim that they work without thought of an audience – that they make 
pictures just for themselves. We are not deceived. The only reward worth that much effort 
is a response, and if no one pays attention, or if the artist cannot live on hope, 
then he or she is lost.

Robert Adams

It is sometimes hard to know what people see in pictures, or if they see anything at all. Tina, my wife, is my closest friend and biggest supporter but even she is unlikely to be able to say what motivated me to take a given photograph or what it means for me now. And that was the stimulus for today’s remodeling of the larger web site of which this blog is part: to make space for words with the images, to offer my current interpration (at the time of writing) of some that I care most about.

Roland Barthes wrote that “Photography is an uncertain art, as would be (were one to attempt to establish such a thing) a science of desirable or detestable bodies.”  Meaning (I think?) that you, the spectator, are unlikely to be affected by or interpret the images that I offer in the same way that I am affected by them or understand them. Nevertheless, I hope you will take a look at the new home page and browse around from there: http://www.mikebroadway.com .

* Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 18

Swimming pool at sunset, Hunt, Texas

My photography web site has gone through a few transitions in the years since it began, but it has never been much more than a catalog of images. There has been almost no text, no explanation, nothing for a search engine to index. Worse: until I switched hosting vendors a couple of months ago, allowing me to adopt Rails, I could only use client side JavaScript to drive the pages; the search engines could only see the home page and could not make any sense of that. Now at least Google knows about 700 pages or so but with little more to match searches against than image titles.

Well, all that’s about to change and starting this blog is just the first step.  The new code is written and text content is ready to go. With just a few more evenings to clean up and deploy to the server, the site will have a new home page and the first articles to guide the viewer around 30 years worth of photographs.

The image posted above, taken at a wedding in Hunt, graced the home page of my very first site design but you would have a hard time finding it now if you did not know that it was in a gallery named “Singles 2001 – 2003”, located two thirds of the way down the home page. So I choose this picture to launch my blog and announce the forthcoming web site refresh; I think it deserves a chance to be seen again.