NEW DESIGN - and same old problems

The world seems to be reeling these days, with good news, and horrifying news, and same shit, different place type of news. Who am I to comment on it?

But as someone who thinks often about war, and has written about it here, and as someone clearly concerned with photography, I commend and recommend this article from The New Yorker written by Seymour M. Hersh. As the "intervention" on Libya continues I think about these issues. It's very difficult to want to be a pacifist when looking at a madman, rich and drunk on power and oil cash, who's happy to bomb his own people. But war -- and it IS war -- always always kills and physically and emotionally maims the innocent. And the individuals fighting it, even when they are the perpetrators, are also, always, victims.

In happier news, I've redesigned my website. I will make the images larger but I don't have access to all of my big files from my temporary Los Angeles lair. However, I was too excited to bother waiting for my return to New York, so here it is. I've obviously tweaked the blog's settings to match.

A portfolio website is a type, of a very specific ilk. Blogs are the same, they have to work in typical, predictable fashions. This is merely good information design. But my heart rebels against such conventions. I want discovery and I want to claim originality. The very first website I made had a "hidden" table of contents -- icons appeared when one dragged a mouse over the image of a hopscotch plan being drawn in chalk by a woman (a photograph of mine). A new user would not have any idea that they were to roll their mouse over the hopscotch squares, they just had to figure it out. If the user got that far, they wouldn't have any idea what the icons meant. This type of thing is great when you are a student but, well, we didn't have Google Analytics back then. Now, I don't want to see any stats where visitors abandoning my site immediately. So I sigh and follow the sound advice of simply making the site easy to use.

I've changed the background color to white. It's jarring. White courses from the monitor, I am not sure that it does not overpower the images. But it does seem to make everything a bit lighter, brighter. Doubtless, white provides a new context. Does the portfolio become more "professional"? Is it slicker? Is it more mundane, as the site morphs into a more standardized presentation? Or is it, hopefully, a far more effective way to communicate the real thing -- the meaning and aesthetic of my images?