Concept

A post answering the ‘Why’ of this blog.

Image and text. As a journalism BA student, they teach you everything you ought to know about these two – but it’s no secret knowledge, eventually we are swarmed by a combination of them 24/7.

I’ve been blogging for over 9 years. In the beginning, it was only Hungarian text. Later on, I started blogging both in my mother tongue and in English, too. And then came along analog photography. Although I had many travel blogs before as I had lived in and traversed numerous countries, imagery hadn’t been that much of a deal: I borrowed pictures from folks I travelled with or used my shitty devices just to capture something of my experiences. Text was supposed to tell the majority of my adventures.

But then I got my Minolta.

Things started to change rapidly. I wanted to present my photos to an audience, so at first I just selected a dozen pictures from each roll I got developed and uploaded to Facebook. I got decent feedback, but it felt like I cheated on those images.

Eventually, anyone can be a photographer, and with nowadays’ automatized devices and image-centered social media, it is not really a feat to create pleasing images for the eye. I realised that the effort I put into creating my images are often left untold, and a couple of likes on each post is not really the exchange I want to have after publishing my pictures.

Thus, the idea of analog anecdotes was born. I knew film photography is a hip thing these days, so I had to come up with an idea that proves my audience that analog photography is not only cool because you learn how to put 30 hashtags on instagram to show off about your brand new vintage hobby; but it’s also a deeper method of photography.

The core idea? Every photo has a story in my mind.

Even now, anytime I’d open my google drive to search for new pictures to post, I could recall the exact setting and story behind each frame. This is something that cannot happen if you use a digital camera (well, at least not with every single frame). Nor can it happen if you just shoot on Auto mode with a decent film camera and your only drive is to be hip. I wanted to show film photography has a distinct beauty to it.

Text was the right choice to complement image. This way, a short story or a simple description of the setting of the image shows how much thought and emotion can be put in a single frame. But after a year, form was still an issue. I realised something was missing (apart from being incredibly tardy about updating the blog). I decided to run the blog on a primarily image-first and text-optional basis; you can scroll through my images with some space between each, without reading anything but the titles; and if you want to read about the circumstances a specific picture was taken in, you can click and read it in a separate post.

This way I attempt to create a photo blog and a traditional blog in one place; if you are lazy to read or just bored of my kitschy stories, the stunning innovation of “pagebreak” is just for you. And if you want a little more, you can click on any image to learn more about “how it was taken” tidbits.

The picture used as a cover for this post is the very first picture I took with my Minolta. I might have taken several photos 5-6 years before that, but that was back in the day when I only shot on film because it looked cool. This window is the herald of a new era where I started taking film photography more seriously than merely producing clickbait blog posts.