I’ve seen website building compared to building and settling in a home. The domain is the street address, the hosting is the land the house is built on, and the actual website is the home. Structuring and designing the website is like building and designing the home.
In this sense it can be said that I’m settling in my new, and hopefully final home. I’ve had other websites before, but not quite being able to settle on what they should focus on. Most of them were centered around my academic studies, where I would focus on religion, culture, and politics connected to Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they were all focused around my own bias and being part of one specific side. That bias has changed, and acknowledging that this can happen, has made me consider my approach to what I’m writing about and how to do it.
That’s one reason for why I haven’t been able to settle. My passion for photography is another. I’ve constantly wanted to both focus on the subjects of my studies, in some way or another, as well as on my passion for photography. But I’ve found it hard to combine the two in any meaningful way. At least until now, I hope. The problem is that I’ve approached the one somewhat politically and as an academic, whereas the other has been approached as a passionate fan and at times also as a geek. The two approaches have been hard to combine, and I’ve always ended up having two websites/blogs, meaning that I’ve had to do more work than it should require me to do.
But I believe this has changed now. The main trigger for my need to overcome these two conflicting approaches was my wife, who insisted on me doing something serious out of my photography – which I’m grateful for. Listening to how she talked about my photos made me realize that there’s a third approach, which can combine the two aforementioned approaches, namely to refer to what I’m doing and what interests me as an artist. Yes, I’m fully aware of the pompous connotations of describing one self as an “artist”, and in many ways the term is irrelevant, considering the subjectivity of art. But bear with me, I’m not using this term because I feel important or believe that I’m a person with a special gift. Really, most people can do what I do, if they just care to learn the techniques.
What I mean when I use “artist”, is the way of seeing things as a subjective interpretation of different groups and individuals’ way of expressing thoughts and feelings. Of course, I base my interpretation on my studies, and I mainly present it through the medium of photography. That is, my academic background and personal curiosity is the who, what and why, where my photography is the how and where. I will get more into these points in another post, but in the context of this post I mention them mainly to explain the motivation and foundation of my new “home”.
So here we are. I hope you like my new home, and that you will visit me from time to time, to see what I’m up to. I will always be happy to hear from you, whether you have questions, suggestions, or just want to drop a gentle (or maybe even an excited) “hi”.