Photography World
A photograph is the shared communication to which we all can relate.
I wondered what would happen to the online publication—Photography World—when I died.
Who would continue the photography and writing in my stay? Beginning in 2014, you and I, we built stories from thousands of photographs contributed by international photographers and hundreds of pages of my writing. Yet, in the blink of a digital world eye, it was all gone. This flame of creative content was snuffed out by nearly 50,000 codes of malicious malware.
For so long I avoided the controversial arenas of politics and world events. And so, I must admit that my writing and photography, which neglected such travesties that we all suffer, had become for me as if I were a member of the orchestra playing for the last time on the sinking ship. So maybe the website photographyworld.org was attacked because I finally spoke out…. In any case, this determination of events that led to my loss—our artistic community’s loss—will never be known. The website which housed our creative catalogues was destroyed by the destroyers.
Devastated initially, I felt frozen about where to begin again. Thousands upon thousands of hours, I dedicated time to the Photography World project. It was not in me to begin again.
My son, Nick Thevenin, and I were able to download excel-type files of writing, but none of the website images could be saved because they were encoded with malware. Fortunately, I do have the original images which our international photographers emailed to me over the years.
So, this is what happened to Photography World several years ago and why the website sat dormant with the white screen of death. I suppose that unless something is written in stone, and especially if its world is digital, it dies a thousand deaths in the blink of an eye. I can tell you that impermanence is an easier pill to swallow now. This is a truth which we all must grapple with and come to accept at different times in our lives. Life and death. And what we see and experience on our journeys makes all the difference. It’s the journey, not the destination, where the world happens.
The question arises; do I reinvent the wheel or begin something fresh and new? I am free to decide what I may.
—Mina Thevenin, Owner, Editor, Writer and Photographer of Photography World, Ltd. Co.