What cannot be represented.

The important things cannot be represented. Not fully. Perhaps it's in their nature to be ineffable, to be experienced but not communicated, to be known but not shown. Maybe it's that what is important are people, people I love, myself included, people I care about, and those relationships are private, and photos of those people, myself included, are not ones I'm willing to share except with those people themselves. So there is little to say or show here about those people who are the most important. And maybe it's that I simply don't take many photos of what's most important to me, even of people, and of things that are significant in my life. Those things are in my experience of them, and not in photographs. So I have remarkably few photos of cheese, for example, or of the sea, relative to the frequency with which those things feature in my life, and to the joy I get from them.

So it seems as if this blog is limited in how much it can be about the personally important, the private political. Instead it can be about the external, and about the public political. I'm reflecting this evening on the past and I struggle to know what to represent here from it. I have taken thousands of photos since I moved to London nearly four years ago. Most are not organised or sorted as I have laboriously done with the previous ten years of photos. The vast majority I have not uploaded, they are not accessible online and have never been seen by anyone else. Some I have not looked at again. I looked at some, not even a month's worth, this evening. There were many forgotten joys. And many of those joys were, again, unrepresentable, personal, private, people.

A picture I took nearly 4 years ago, a week before I left for London, seemed to reflect an aspect of that same absence of the important.

A street art sticker in Portobello.

The 11,000+ photos I have on Flickr tell many stories. Some are significant, some beautiful, some trivial, some momentous. 10 years of photos there. They're all part of my story. But maybe they don't, and can't, tell my deepest stories. When I left for London I was looking for my voice. I haven't found it, though I've spoken all along. I have felt for a while that I want to tell a different story. Maybe it's not possible to. But I want to picture more of my real life. And I think I need to speak more in my true voice.