This is the title of the archive I keep of my digital photography. The title came from my poetry and short story archives: Pen Fettish. Some 17 or 18 years ago I heard someone use the word in a positive way, and it stuck with me. Several years later, and a little wiser, I looked the definition up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and this is the first one I found:
fetish: 1 a : an object believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner; broadly : a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence. b : an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion.
Very appropriate, I thought.
For those of you who know me well, you know I have a penchant for mad scribblings and a tendency to spend days working over the small details of a photo I’ve shot. I love it, and it’s a definitive, creative outlet, like music. In the beginning, I was too young to know that I was using the incorrect spelling of the word (fettish, not fetish), but the misspelling stuck through the years.
I’ve decided to start putting more of my more personal work on the web – not sure yet if it’ll be on this blog or on a separate page, but the idea is to have everything in one place.