If you look at a satellite view of 67° 48' 0"N, 12° 50' 0"E in Google Maps, all you will see is a pointer into the sea off the tip of a rugged island off the northwest coast of Norway.
Courtesy Norwegian Hydrographic Service
This is the location of the Moskstraumen (popularly known as the Malström or Maelstrom), a system of tidal eddies and whirlpools, one of the strongest in the world, that forms twice a day in the strait adjacent to the Lofoten archipelago.
The term Maelstrom originates in the Norse eda of Grottasöngr, referring ultimately to a pair of magical grindstones that could produce anything that could be wished for if you could move and operate them.
I'm not a great writer, in fact I'm a pretty poor writer, so I'll simply say that I've named this blog "Maelstrom" to refer to the swirling nature of the creative thoughts in my fevered brain more than anything else alluded to above.
There is one more metaphorical link to the blog title though, and that is to "the rock and the hard place" we as photographers find ourselves in between today, and the specific reason that ultimately this business of ours was created.
The Maelstrom is often linked in writing with the whirlpool Charybdis, one of the pair of monsters of Greek mythology known as Scylla and Charybdis, two monsters sitting aside a narrow strait that sailors had to sail through, so close together that to avoid one you had to pass within deadly range of the other.
We could name these monsters after the two businesses that have gobbled up most of our industry, and forever changed the nature of world in which we live business wise, removing the concept of "agency" and substituting "distributor", and who ultimately wish to remove independent "vendors" of images altogether and replace them with wholely owned content.
We could also name these monsters after the tremendous forces unleashed by the internet and digital imaging, which have also forever changed the world we live and work and create in, destroying the very value of the images we create by making it dramatically easier to produce and distribute images, with an inbuilt market expectation that Internet "content" (eg: images) should be free.
Mythylogical allegories aside, the era in which we grew up and came of age in as professional creative image makers has changed beyond recognition, effectively disappearing forever.
If we are to survive, we must change, and change faster than the behemoths and forces that sit astride and move our industry can change.
Michael Beasley