While this website was being reorganised, images from my exhibition and portfolio appeared beside unrelated articles. I asked for them to be removed. There were other images available. I did not want these works scattered around the site simply because they could fill a space.
The images were still recognisable. What bothered me was the job they had been given. Beside an article title, an image helps a reader decide whether to open the page. Within a series, it has a place among other images. I had been thinking about the series, and now its individual parts were being asked to introduce quite different subjects.
I can imagine a reader meeting one of those images first as a small illustration. Later, in the portfolio, the reader might recognise it. That recognition could be useful, but it could also carry the earlier article into the work. I would like to decide when that connection is worth making.
This does not mean that an image must remain in one place forever. A photograph can move from a screen to a book, and from a book to an exhibition. I want to be able to make those moves. Each one brings decisions about size, surrounding images and the words nearby. Using the same file again is easy; deciding what the new placement does takes more care.
Nor do I want a hierarchy in which every portfolio image is valuable and every illustration is expendable. The image beside this note deserves attention too. It does not need to pretend to belong to an exhibition, or to document something that happened to me. Its purpose here can be modest and still be deliberate.
As I bring more of my work together on LuxLatens, these boundaries will matter. An essay can lead to a series through a link. A note can discuss a book without borrowing its images for decoration. Sometimes showing a work directly will be the clearest choice. I want that choice to follow the subject, rather than the need to put something into an empty rectangle.
There is room here for a work to be encountered in its own sequence. For now, I would like to give it that room.
