2025 12 24

Dedication to a habit. Chicago, Illinois. January, 2023. © Clayton Hauck

At the beginning of the year, I promised myself I’d dedicate a bunch of time this year to street photography. While I failed miserably at this promise, I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. Despite the lack of street photography, I’ve still put an impressive amount of time and attention towards photography both of my own making and that of others. The reason I bring up street photography is because this week I caught a fantastic documentary on youtube called Everybody Street. It’s free with a youtube plan and well worth your time.

While “failing” in one area of my photo practice, this here blog has been a bit more successful. Not from any measurable metrics (we still get more visits from Chinese bots than people around here), but from a personal priming perspective. The other morning, while walking the dog, we heard some odd noises off in the distance. “Aliens?!” I thought to myself, rather hilariously, in hindsight. But that’s the thing: I’d just been spending way too much time on twitter reading silly posts about how we’re not alone and aliens are among us. I was primed to think that.

“The only advice I have is that you do something connected to photography every day of your life and you’ll be surprised what happens.” This quote from Richard Avedon was, and remains, one of the foundational perspectives of why I put so much time into this thing. While I’m sensitive about how so many of the posts around here tend to be about me, myself, and I (realistically, this is a terrible way to gain readership, I acknowledge), I do need to remind myself that the only reason I put the time into this blog is because I’m doing it for myself. On that note, I plan to dig into 2024’s year-end personal projections and do a bit of an update to see how things played out in 2025. Fortunately, I did not pick up smoking, despite the reasonable justification to do so. * gestures broadly *

-Clayton