Today I published a post I was genuinely proud of.
Not because it performed well. Not because it checked some imaginary SEO box. But because it felt honest, intentional, and aligned with the way I’m learning to see — both with and without a camera.
And almost immediately after publishing it, I did something I don’t do often enough.
I looked back.
Not at the images or blog posts, but at the structure holding them together.
That’s when I noticed something I hadn’t really wanted to admit: the organization of my posts — what’s formally known as taxonomy — was cumbersome and unintuitive, to put it politely.
The Quiet Problem Beneath the Work
Individually, the posts made sense to me.
Collectively, the site did not.
I had categories that felt right at the time I created them, but made very little sense when viewed across the body of work. Some overlapped. Some said nothing. Others tried to do too much.
Worse, I had no meaningful tags at all.
Not because I didn’t believe in them — but because I never stopped long enough to decide what actually mattered enough to be repeated.
The irony wasn’t lost on me.
I spend a lot of time writing about intention, discipline, and presence in my photography — ideas I explore directly in posts like Finding Style in the Street: The 28mm Field of View and the Discipline of Presence — Yet the structure of my own site had been built reactively, post by post, without ever stepping back to ask:
What am I really saying here, over time?
Turning to ChatGPT as a Thinking Partner
So I did something that felt both obvious and slightly uncomfortable for me.
I turned to ChatGPT — not to write for me, but to help me see what I’d built.
This felt like exactly the kind of task AI would be good at: pattern recognition, structure, coherence. Things that are hard to do when you’re emotionally invested in every word you’ve written.
I didn’t ask it to invent categories out of thin air.
I gave it the raw material:
- A complete list of my blog posts
- My static pages
- Context about how I think about photography, walking, cities, and visibility — themes I’ve written about explicitly in Why My Photography Must Be Seen
And then I let the conversation unfold.
What Became Clear Very Quickly
What surprised me wasn’t how fast structure emerged — it was how obvious it felt once I saw it laid out.
There were clear themes running through everything:
- Urban photography
- Walking as practice
- Street portraits and proximity
- The 28mm field of view
- Personal voice and long-term projects
- The need for photography to be seen, not just made
None of this was new.
I’ve written directly about walking as both a physical and creative practice in Why Walking the City Is Essential to My Urban Photography Practice, and about long-term commitment in Chapter Two of the Two-Year Project.
The ideas were already there.
They just weren’t being honoured structurally.
The Moment It Clicked
The real turning point came when we mapped every post into a spreadsheet:
- Title
- Category
- Tags
- URL
Seeing the entire site laid out like that was confronting — in a good way.
There was no hiding from inconsistencies.
No room for vague labels.
Each post had to belong somewhere.
That process felt a lot like editing photographs.
You can love an image.
But if it doesn’t belong in the sequence, it doesn’t belong in the sequence.
It’s the same logic I admire in strong visual storytelling — the kind I wrote about when studying the structure behind classic photo essays in How to Build a LIFE Magazine Photo Essay.
What This Changed for Me
Once the taxonomy became coherent, the site started to feel quieter, not a bunch of noise.
Not emptier — clearer.
I could see which posts were foundational.
More importantly, from now on, every new post has to answer a few simple questions:
- What category does this strengthen?
- What recurring ideas does it reinforce?
- How does it fit into the larger body of work?
That same sense of coherence is something I’m actively chasing in my street portrait work as well — especially in projects like Faces of Toronto, where repetition and constraint are what give the work meaning over time.
A Familiar Lesson, Relearned
In many ways, this experience mirrored what I’ve been learning on the street with a camera.
You don’t find clarity by adding more.
You find it by paying attention.
By stepping back.
By noticing patterns.
By removing what doesn’t belong.
ChatGPT didn’t give my site a voice.
It helped me hear the one that was already there — underneath the noise.
And once you hear it, you have the responsibility to listen.