Where do I start? This was my first question after receiving so many comments and emails regarding how to journal. We live in a world where much of what we do is controlled by something else or someone else, so suddenly facing an activity with no rules can be, oddly enough, daunting. Wait, I can do anything? Okay, what is it I actually want to do?
I feel that the most relevant hurdle to modern journaling is the idea of audience.
We now have generations of humans who live their lives for public consumption. An act, if you will, designed to be palatable to the masses, popular or controversial. Living a life like this is traumatic, and it is also tough to turn off because it plays on the chemistry coursing through our veins. Code-based chemical dependency.
Journaling, if done correctly, can immediately identify who you are.
For some of us, this is precisely the prickly point. Finding out who we are can be sobering, to say the least. Journaling without borders is liberating, but discovering newfound freedom often brings growing pains. The key is to start. No matter the pen. No matter the paper. No matter the brand of journal. No matter the ambience the internet tells you is required. No matter the time of day or your mood or state of mind. No matter the music playing through your headphones. These phony requirements are part of the act I mentioned above. Do you want to be a photographer or do you want to dress and talk and act like a photographer without actually being one? Sound familiar YouTube?
I believe if you journal every day for two weeks you will never stop. Even a paragraph or two of random thoughts or bullet points. Read back to yourself. Annotate, script, imagine, and explore the deepest, darkest recesses of what is left of your brain. Good luck, have fun.
Comments 16
I was happy to see I’m not the only one who pastes boarding passes into my journal. My wife is always like why do we need to print these things out. We can just use our phones. Nope…need them for the journal.
Author
I used to it all the time, but it’s rare these days. Not entirely sure how this one ended up there.
This was excellent. I’ve had journals off and on forever. Unfortunately, I often end up with containers of things to paste in after trips, intending for it to be organized. It isn’t, because I’m not using the journals consistently enough. Thanks for showing the print / paste technique – I couldn’t figure out if you were doing that on the go or prior to.
Putting printer prints that can take ink had me briefly considering my vow (made multiple times after multiple f-bombs) to never buy another printer. Your “struggling” printer seems well suited to the effect!
Author
You can always outsource the prints…I used to do that quite a lot, actually.
Author
Technique has changed many times over the years, but all of them work, at least to some degree.
Such an excellent and fun clip — so great to go behind the curtain and see how you approach your journal, and I picked up some good tricks, too — thank you.
Do you generally put your book notes into the journal you’re working on? (I’ve gone back and forth on keeping separate journals for notes on books or just dropping them into whatever current journal I’m keeping.)
And you nailed it — truly, the notion of an audience is paralyzing and ruins everything for journal keeping. It’s astonishing how strong and persistent that idea of a reader over your shoulder can be. I’ve kept notebooks for decades, and I’m still haunted by the nightmare of some icy-eyed editor lurking over me.
Finally, another big thank you. I’ve kept notebooks all my life. But when I first encountered your stuff, your examples opened up a lot of possibilities. That, along with your discussing the work of Peter Beard massively changed how I work with journals now. It’s been, and continues to be, a blast.
Author
Sometimes I do the book notes on my iPad. Easy to refer back to, but then again, most of the time I’m not around my iPad. And yes, audience is a real issue for all us.
Thanks for sharing this! I’ve been considering keeping a journal every now and again, but never kept it up. I think I’ll give it another try. Apart from unconstrained, stream-of-consciousness writing, the journal as a real, physical object (as opposed to a digital file) seems to be important.
Very inspiring video; I believe for this kind of content a video works better than written text.
Author
I love how they look and feel.
We were all obliged to keep a diary when in school, which was mainly to remind us of our homework and other scholastic duties. As a personal diary, are you kidding? Would you strew your own path with written proof of where you were at? Never put it in writing: it will return to nibble your ass!
Life quickly becomes filled with not-wanted-onboard cargo. Look at the physical mess that poor old Saul Leiter ended up living in! There was hardly room to turn around and change walking direction; the photographic proof of this is to be found online, or in the book The Unseen Saul Leiter. In my humble estimation, the very best way that one might preserve what is really worthwhile – why bother with the rest? – is in a real photograph on paper. I met my wife when I was seventeen; she died fifteen years ago when I was seventy-one. Even after all those years together, I realise that I remember her best from a tiny photo of her that I made for her International Driving Licence when she was about forty-two. So much for actual unsupported memory of even the most loved things in your life. Of all the then “exciting” places that my career took us, none of them now matters a damn; that’s the freedom of mind that age brings with it: you learn that people and love count, the rest isn’t worth squat. Save yourselves the work of creating documents today that when you imagine you will cherish them, you won’t: you will only face the difficult and certainly painful decision of throwing them away, if only to preserve your own space and sanity.
As for keeping a record of one’s “personal” photography, that’s why I have a website: it’s a one-stop service for me where I can access my stuff at any time without having to start looking at file libraries in drives somewhere. If it’s a reasonable shot, there it goes, the hell with whether it’s the very best of a lifetime. It’s not a selling tool; I don’t care what anyone else thinks.
As Dan is wont to say: one guy, one opinion. YMMD. 😉
Your wintertime wisdom is bracing, thank you. One of my favorite novels bears the title of ‘A Sport and a Pastime’ from a line from the Koran, of all places. Life as a sport and a pastime is a notion I’ve only welcomed in my late middle age. For me, working with journals, that’s about it. A pastime. No one will care about them. Few will even see them. It’s a species of “scrapbooking” to be brutally honest. But it’s fun for me. The act of writing as well gives me pleasure. I packed up and tossed my mother in law’s possessions recently — 93 years of a full, rich life, and nearly all of it reduced to junk without her presence. (A point you make rather well). Clearly, we need the discipline of hard edits to avoid drowning in our own debris. Still . . . I like making photos, I like writing stuff down, and I’ve grown to enjoy pasting all the scraps and tidbits into the pages, too. None of it matters in the big sense. Does anyone read Dante, or even Dostoyevsky? And they are beyond genius. How many people off the street or in a photo workshop could describe a photo of Saul Leiter, a great photographer!, even published by Steidl? Fame certainly is shallow, even for the greats. Your reminding me that freedom and people are all that matter is a good gift, thank you, sincerely — it should be a mantra we all say every morning. But I’ll still keep my trinkets and geegaws going in the meantime, if only because I have not yet leveled up to the status of the nomads who carried only what they needed.
Author
Yes, I think these things all mean different things to all of us. I have letters from my mother to my grandmother. Are they profound? No, not really. But they sure are fun to read. And insightful in some ways. My journals help me understand the now and they help with discipline. But for other folks they probably aren’t needed or even interesting.
Author
It’s about personal preference. The journal, at least for me, is as important as anything else I’m doing. It’s a catalyst in the middle of everything. But if that isn’t interesting to you, heck, skip it. But I never imagined I would cherish these things, they offer me insight to the now, not the past.
“Journaling if done correctly….” Is contradictory to your often stated “ there isn’t a correct way to journal,” don’t you think? Just saying!
I find your writing and videos on this subject inspiring. Because of you, I have an Instax and now routinely glue pictures into my journal entries. I’m not quite to the point where I paint over things or write atop the images but I’m getting there. I’m about to exhaust my current journal and may switch to something un- lined so that I’m not constrained / forced by the lines to just write a narrative.
Author
Correctly only in the sense of knowing there isn’s a “correct” way. This makes sense to me, but I can understand if it doesn’t to others.