On narrative image collecting i.e. That's my business

The basic fear of starting a blog for me is

phewwww

I feel like I definitely could, and more or less should, blog about EVERYTHING .

(hence my recent blog post being about the UNIVERSE for crying out loud. Oh hybris..*)

Ok.

So I make a blog about pictures and trying to find "a narrative".

The narrative is something that has been interesting me for some time. I studied animation that has to do with both visuals and narrative. As my final thesis work I wrote about the supposed narrative in the work of Mamma Andersson's paintings. Looking for reading material I inevitably ran into Mieke Bal, one of the main ladies of the narrative theory, who has written about something called narrative image collecting. I might blog about her theories more later, but what initially caught me was the feeling of recognizion. I was and am definitely a collector of images.

I've had a fffound account (that's Fffound with four F's. Now that that's out of the way excuse me when I forget one or two.) for some time now, it is a wonderful place where you can save pictures by fffounding them. I have a little button on my browser tool bar and when I see a picture on the internet that I really like, I press the button and it is added to my ffound, added to my my collection.

For some people Ffffound can be a place to collect "cool things", like stuff you can use for your next commissioned illustration or ad campaign and that's fine too.

For me, ffounding is making a mark and jotting something things down like taking a note. The fffounding process inevitably takes on a form of a narrative and that is such a nice thing to watch.

The sad thing is that you need an invite to Ffffound and I don't have any left. Many friends use Tumblr for the same thing and it is more or less something in between fffound and a blog, mostly concentrating on making visual notes. Who knows maybe I just tumbled into the right tumblrs (sorry I couldn't help the wordplay), but they also certainly have a strong, personal story to tell. The layout of tumblrs is also very pleasing and uncluttered. So if this image collecting business sounds tempting, I say go for it.

So I wanted to make this blog - and when I use the term blog here, it means visuals and text combined. Often when I would Ffffound a picture I would have an urge to write something beside it, like a note. I love Ffffound in all its nonverbality that leaves so much space for personal interpretations but I started to get the feeling I want to write too, I don't want to forget the connection that was made in the impulse of ffffounding.

I did contemplate on making a tumblr instead of a blogspot because of it's look. So why did I go with blogger? Even if nothing prevents me from typing text into a tumblr my feeling of tumblrs was that they are very imagecentric and image colllecting in them would be too much like something that I already do with Fffound, just on a different platform. Blogspot seemed like a decent place to combine this visuals and text thing that so intrigues me.

Soooooo

I made this and was instantly faced with

First wave of feeling:
I feel like I should blog about every picture I've found

(imagine illustration: second wave crashing on a beach. If you have a very bad imagination, see here for examples.)

Second:
Ok.. can't do that... maybe blog about every picture I've ffffound?

(imagine illustration: third wave crashing on a beach)

Third:
Phew. That's lot of work. And I want to get to the new, to the now, at some point.

(imagine illustration: fourth wave crashing on a beach)

Fourth:
Maybe group all the pictures I've ffffound into groups and then blog about the groups? Like.. translucent places and other nomadic homes, pretty dresses and pencil drawings, heroes, veiled objects, textures, eyelashes, the color black, knits, all the time going into smaller categories. Like go from film stills to czech new wave to the eyelash of a really pretty girl who is at the same time something that would quite naturally be categorized as ugly. So ok maybe that girl was from an early Milos Forman film and I don't exactly have a picture of THOSE particular EYELASHES on my fffound but you get my point**.


I'm still undecided if I will do this. But. The main point to this blogging and image collecting business I actually found out last spring as I was writing that thesis on Mamma Andersson's paintings. My goal was to spend time with the pictures and let the final text be some sort of a document of that time***.

There is no what and why but there is a path that can be shown. And what I must do now, in one way or the other? Illuminate it, illustrate it, trust it, walk it, figure it out and go deeper into da mystery cave, spend time, make more time to look at pictures and who knows. Maybe another thing will pop out.

Looking only leads to more looking, yeahhhhh. But please let me look!

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So maybe...

what I'm most afraid offf, and what is really driving me to do this, is not that I will actually reveal something or make this to a tedious task of making myself have a go at blogging about everything

but it's more the fear that I will just

stop looking.





I mean, I was just getting started and all!

Love, Elina

* Hybris is basically a synonym of insult according to the ancient greek and all in all, a very condemnable feeling which leads into bad things. But man, I just wanted to make out with the universe.. is that really so bad?

** hmmm subject to blog about: pictures that I THOUGHT I had in my fffound but don't.

*** If reading this you get a feeling that you, my dear hopefully potentially not-makebelieve but flesh-and-bones kind of reader, want to read my thesis, it's safely nesting at the library of Turku Arts Academy. Mind you, I hope you don't go ahead and do it, because I'm already quite embarrassed about it. I have been given the possibility to rehearse and rewrite it for an article and I dread the moment that I actually have to read it through again. Ok ok, what did I just write about "the path" and "the mystery cave". YES. I know all this. And most of all, embarrasment has to do with EVERYTHING, anything that's worth the while. I well know I can't stop you from reading it, should you want it, luckily there is an ocean between the damn beloved thesis and most of my readers and maybe I'm just assuming too much, maybe you'd rather not read it at all. When I start working on the rehearsed version of the text, maybe I will have the energy and guts to translate it into English then. At least blog about it. Who knows.