Dear Jackie,

I had been thinking through your project anyway so it would be useful to meet up (the Tuesday or Friday you suggest) for a day of taking stock.

1. A short list of what you have already achieved might be good.

1.1 a comprehensive catalogued and collated database of raw material

1.2 a shortlist of original ideas within the subject

1.3 the development of the WWW as a meaningful vehicle for certain of those ideas.

1.4 This is really important because I sense you keep forgetting what you have done.

2. A short description of what you have done recently - with a particular emphasis on the impact of going out and meeting people. ÒYou ought to get out more...Ó factor.

3. What's to be done next (up to October 1999, and avoiding all references to the Millennium).

3.1 a month by month plan of how to advance, giving yourself a goal in say November of a major presentation at Portsmouth - perhaps in a research conference of staff you and Mo have done at Po.

3.2 (and I think most important) just for one brief moment - say three days - pretend you are not going to deliver this in multimedia form. I have this lingering suspicion that neither of us yet has cracked the linear versus radial, and that the problem can foment dithering and the spinning of the head. I have dithering and spinning in abundance, so can speak clearly and decisively on the subject. Devise an eight chapter sequence as if this were to be a book eg

• Introduction with statement of intent; why America, why unease.

• The product and its marketing - post war; • Imagining the anxious - defining its cheerful concealment

• The role of the image makers - in the Agency, in the Market, photography versus art work.

• Case Studies (say 4)

Then - end of exercise - back to what you want to do, and how you want to do it. You have at least an armature to further work.

3.3 I think you need a gallery - like, now - so that when I go to your website (perhaps the beginnings of the project's Portsmouth's presence) I enter into the simplest of classifications. I would then find say eight galleries, and in each gallery there are eight images. From this I could extrapolate - your general choice of significant images, the way your taxonomy is being created. This (and others we could discuss) is one of several basic exercises to establish a continuity in your studies, and a sense of proportion in what you do. I have a gut feeling (yuk) that you're making too big an issue of things and should get down to a sort of steadiness without guilt, a world without conscience.

3.4 I think it would help your momentum and confidence if you wrote something with pictures that got published within the year . I would love to help and edit, and then retire to the anonymity I so richly deserve.

4. So let's both look at your notation system for the storage of images and texts and moments of clarity and aper�us and things caught in the light of the camp fire's flickering flames. From this meeting onwards we will both know the ongoing agenda rather than putting air back into the lilo .