living with the work you've done by doing for the future

As much as I love holding a finished book in my hand—quietly, alone, when the big box arrives—nothing gives me greater peace than to know that I have a new idea stirring. New worlds to build. New characters to decode. New metaphors.

Working toward the next is, in fact, the only way I know how to live with what already exists. How to maintain my perspective. How to keep the spotlight where it must be—not on the past but on the future. How to hold true to who I actually am—a writer, not a brand builder, not a saleswoman, not a stumper.

Yesterday, reading, again Sally Mann's Hold Still, I came upon these words at the start of her ninth chapter. They resonate with me:

When I get asked what one piece of advice I have for young photographers, this is what I tell them: if you are working on a project, and you're thinking maybe it's time to put it out into the world, make sure you have already started your next body of work. Not just started, either: you should be well along on it. You will know that the first project is finished when you find yourself joylessly going through the motions to eke out a few more pictures while, like a forbidden lover, the new ones call seductively to you. This new lover should be irresistible, and when it calls, you will be in its urgent thrall, making the work of your heart.

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"Photographs supplant and corrupt the past." — Sally Mann, HOLD STILL

As far back as 1901 Emile Zola telegraphed the threat of this relatively new medium, remarking that you cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it. What Zola perhaps also knew or intuited was that once photographed, whatever you had "really seen" would never be seen by the eye of memory again. It would forever be cut from the continuum of being, a mere sliver, a slight, translucent paring from the fat life of time; elegiac, one-dimensional, immediately assuming the amber quality of nostalgia: an instantaneous memento mori. Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.

Sally Mann, Hold Still

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