Nearby Café
A D Coleman opened his Nearby Café web site along with a regular web newsletter, C: the Speed of Light in 1995, the same year as I put my first site, ‘Family Pictures‘ on line. I’ve always enjoyed reading Coleman’s writing about photography, although of course I haven’t always agreed with everything that he says, but he is one of very few people to write intelligently about our medium. So I’ve made a habit of dropping in to the site occasionally to see if there is anything new on line.
On the Front Burner as a part of that site to producing a blog – written like this one using WordPress. It’s called Photocritic International, a title to which he has a better claim than most, and its one I’ll be following regularly. In fact there are at least two posts he’s already made that I want to write about when I have a little more time.
Family Pictures
My own first site – Family Pictures – still looks almost exactly the same as it did in 1995, though minor changes have been made as browsers and html have evolved to keep it more or less in its original state, and then it was hosted on a free site in the USA. The scans, re-made early in 1996, slightly larger than the originals, look primitive by today’s standards with an odd dotty sparkle on most of them, possibly because they were from prints made on a Pearl photographic paper.
The pictures were already old work when I put them on line, taken between 1976 and 1982, and one of them shows a baby of six months or so who helped me work out how to write the site and put it on line in 1995. He now writes web sites as a part of his work.
One day I’ll perhaps go back and look at the work again – there are some pictures I know I should have included – and perhaps one or two I’d want to leave out, and I wince when I look at these scans. But for me it’s a little reminder of how much things have changed over the years, both personally and with the web – and how it has changed my own life.