I started writing a short story today. It will be the third short story I have written since last year. I think I will need around five to put a book together. The latest story is an attempt to bring together things I am not very clear on into focus so I can understand them better. I hear a lot of interesting stories and ideas from people I meet and interact with. A lot of it is fascinating though my knowledge is limited in regard to what I am hearing. Sometimes things sit in the back of my mind and I turn them over. You may understand the statement but not the background to it. You could even agree with the statement but not truly know how it relates to a certain culture or belief system. The story I am setting out to write doesn’t have to make any sense or have any conclusions. It just needs to roll the statements over into various positions to hopefully see how they could relate to a reader or writer. It may even confuse me more but it is worth looking at.

Recently I scanned some photographs I had taken around Sydney over the years and put them on Flickr under my user name ‘doer aerosol’. I didn’t scan everything but probably will scan more photos at a later date. There are photos from 1993 to around 2004. I also put some digital images on Flickr that I had made in 2000 from video stills from 1993 to 1997 that were my first body of work out of art school. I have exhibited some of them. There are sixteen images all named as a number from one to sixteen. I had done the groundwork for the images in my Honours year which was a bit of a disaster to be honest. At least something came out of that period that has survived all of these years. Also the pictures on Flickr are a kind of archive of Sydney and some people I have known over the years.

I feel grateful that I have the key photos of graffiti work I have done over the years. A lot of original photos have gone missing or the scans are not traceable. Some work only survives as web ready images because of old technology that is now superseded. Luckily the most important work remains. It doesn’t amount to a lot but it makes sense as a body of work. All in all there were only a small amount of works that could be classified as art from 1993 to 2003. Also the work from the past six years follows that path of artistic significance. A lot of graffiti is just plain fun and games. I wouldn’t really be able to justify all of these missing works as having anything to do with artistic merit. I tried to keep the most significant scans on Flickr. Also the high resolution panoramic images are on Flickr. 

There are around eight hundred images on Flickr with over a hundred being part of an art career that has spanned a few decades on the streets of Sydney. There are gaps but you can’t get every photo or expect that people will scan them for you from their collections. I am sure I have the most significant in my own collection thanks to various people and my own documentation. I was slow to document my own work and at times I couldn’t actually afford to get film or process film. There are some works that I thought were lost but I found out that some people had taken photos. Although these works are not key works albeit probably two I feel that within five years I will have enough work documented for a book of my own pieces. I need to create new work to really finish what I have started so many years ago and I need to ignore anything extraneous. I am quite focused on getting to that point.