On Flickr, I belong to a group called the Duluth Photographer's Guild, a gang of about 100 local photographers of varying ages and interests who share pictures and discuss photography both on Flickr and in real life. Recently, one of them asked the rest of us to post about our experience: how long we've been taking pictures, how we got started, etc.

I didn't respond, because when I started to think about it, I had way too much to say. I won't even go into it much here, because it's a long and rambling history with no point to it, other than this: All in all, photography for me is deeply connected to writing and cartooning. They are all facets of storytelling. And storytelling is something that, for some reason, I feel compelled to do.

This blog is fine for words and occasional photos. Flickr is fine as a social-networking tool. But what I really want to do is create a space for photos only. The photoblog will be just that -- a photographic journal, an autobiography entirely in pictures with very few words. Individually, the photos won't mean much, although I hope to take some good shots. I mean this blog to be paged through like an album. They'll tell a story. Not a beginning, middle, and end kind of story. One frame won't lead to the next or anything overly forced like that. But they will say something. Collectively, the photos should bring a feeling of certain people living in a certain place at a certain time.

As I said, there will be few words on the photoblog. There will be no comments allowed whatsoever. I suppose this means that fewer people will look at it, and that's OK. I'm not really in this whole blogging thing to get a huge audience. I'm happy with the audience I already have.