Where do we find the topics for our work

Most of the time, the topics for our research follow naturally from what we have been doing earlier or just before. Sometimes, as for historians or literary scholars, they have a number of problems in mind, perhaps sourced in their doctoral training, and they go from one book to another based on the topics they have had in mind for a very long time.

People discover new problems not because they are great explorers, in general. They find something in the archives, they are asked a question when they give talks, they respond to the interests of funders and publishers. Again, they may have problems in mind, and over the decades they  get the chance to pursue one path after another.

For myself, there might be an insight, out of the blue, than then fuels my curiosity. To understand one of my books I need to write another. In photographing, I may discover what someone is doing that allows me to follow in their footsteps but employing my own shoes and my own purposes. I want to understand something, and after a decade I understand more than I first imagined, and I discover there is book there. Sometimes there are analogies between areas I think about, and those analogies are rather fruitful.

Lee Friedlander, the photographer, says that he finds the topics for his photographs by noticing something in a few of his photographs and then decides to see if it will work when he does a lot more of photographs under the discovered topic (suggested by those few photographs). This strikes me as right for myself. In other words I am doing somethings, and there seems to be a topic that makes sense of those somethings or is suggested by them, and so I work more in those directions.

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