Just got my hands on an iPad. The moment I held it in my hand it really felt like something very special. After 30 years of home computers a device has finally arrived that makes it a pleasure to read text and view images on. To the naysayers, yes it’s an over sized iPhone locked down by Apple’s walled garden of censorship. But the iPad is a truly compelling tool that will hopefully spark the imaginations of hardware manufactures and software developers to drive inovation into exciting unchartered territories. As for photographers, artists writers, and journalists I really hope we grasp this shift in media and make something as interesting as the device itself.
I was born into a strong literary household. Books stacked on shelves, piled on side tables, and casually strewn about occupied every room of the home. The printed word, a form of DNA is coded into the fabric of my ancestry. A linage of journalists going back three generations stand behind me. In spite of this I struggle with text. I find reading anything longer than a 500 word article a challenge. And putting pen to paper is a very rare occurrence. I don’t dislike written words. I just find it hard to stick with them. Being a child born of the Nintendo, VHS, and satellite TV generation I have from an early age experienced much of the world visually. Words are something that appear on screen between a mass of intense moving images. In primary school I was force fed a curriculum of numbers and text dressed up in a questionable narrative which I often found to be a meaningless chore to wade through. I never enjoyed reading in the same way I enjoyed playing Pac Man or watching a Stanley Kubrik film. And I spent far more time doing the latter. Yet despite my D in Leaving Cert English my teachers always said I wrote well. A painfully frustrating contradiction that baffled me for years.
Throughout those years I started more blogs than I care to remember. Half thought out, badly written they hang stillborn in cyberspace with long forgotten passwords. Their presence revealed by the odd Google search scraping at my conscience each time they appear before me. I think what compeled me to write them was in part a unreconciled guilt aimed at myself for failing to follow my forefather’s footsteps and an utter failing at a subject the experts said I was supposed to be good at. Somewhere I was trying to become the writer I thought I should have been and what I thought the world wanted of me. Brute force. I’m a peg forcing myself into an ill fitting hole. Exhausted after repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result I finally surrendered. I work better with images than I do with text. Once I accepted that simple fact about myself things began to change. I’ve come to know that in many ways I’m the same as my journalistic forefathers. We read stories. We tell stories. They use paper and ink. I use a camera and a computer screen.
