Every so often my brain feels overloaded with all too many different threads — thoughts, epiphanies, worries, discoveries, regrets — well, you get the point. Normally I try to let things settle before attempting to distill one or two useful subjects to explore further and to write about. But, after yet another sleepless night (not unusual) I felt it might be liberating to throw it all out there and just let it be.
Petrified Velvet
Perhaps a good place to start would be a hesitant recommendation for the movie Manufactured Landscapes, on the work of Edward Burtynsky. This is an immensely important document, and not just for the photography or the photographer. I consider Burtynsky to be a visual genius but have always had a hard time with his work, reducing damaged places and people to just their visual (beautiful) elements, celebrating the aesthetic veneer that belies decay of land and soul. To be honest, I could not watch it to the end. Images of modern slaves – beautiful people devoid of humanity and wildness as they become cogs in an industrial machine – brought about a surge of anger and sadness so profound that about 15 minutes in, I completely forgot this was a movie about photography. You should see this movie if only so that you, too, may remain ever vigilant NOT to become an empty human shell valued only for your ability to produce consumer goods or provide a repetitive service at the expense of pursuing your own desires and experiencing life in the raw.
Somewhat related is a discussion I had with a friend recently that ended up with a profound question: how would you like to be remembered? Each of us, whether we do so deliberately or not, has to strike a balance in our lives and decide how to carve out our most valuable gifts (time, intellect, creativity, etc.) among work, art, family, study, and any number of other pursuits. So many let themselves be carried with the currents, doing what’s expected or convenient at any given time at the great risk of realizing too late that they neglected to place proper value on certain important things. I’m sure every one of us can think of things we’d like to accomplish if we only had a choice. Well, most of us DO have a choice. This is not to say the choice is easy, but the penalty for not making a deliberate choice yourself is having it made for you by others. The implications can be severe. Close your eyes and visualize your headstone. What will it say? Will it be “great artist,” “great employee,” “great friend/parent/sibling,” “great… anything?”
And, as existential thinking often goes, the smallest things may stir the train of thoughts onto new tracks with as little as a random comment. A friend recently remarked that some of my images made her cry. I told her that some of them were also conceived in the same state of mind. Cynicism is the enemy of creativity but is also a requirement for survival in the man-made world. I often tell people I need a couple of days outdoors before I can start relating to it creatively. This is the time it takes to shed the cynicism of daily life and open up to the simple beauty of natural places. Perhaps those who make a quick trip and return in frustration having not found “anything to photograph” are simply not allowing sufficient time for this transformation. Creativity is the expression of the self and those in fear of experiencing raw emotion may never know what lies within their own brains, making them who they are. I believe that true art is a product of profound emotion. My response to my friend was: “if you can’t cry, you can’t be an artist”.
I think this will do for one early morning. Until next time.
Late Night Brain DumpTags: art, burtynsky, creativity, musings, photography
A reader reminded me of this article I first published last year and I thought it would be useful to share again on this journal.
~
In his book “The Proud Robot,” 1940s science fiction writer Henry Kuttner tells the story of an eccentric inventor who wakes up from a drunken stupor to discover that while intoxicated he built a talking robot with a complex narcissistic personality. He then struggles to remember why he did it. By the end he realizes he really just wanted to build a better beer can opener and got a little carried away.
Think about modern photography in the same light and how much we have wrapped around the basic concept of making images. I’m not talking so much about the astounding technology involved, but rather about the tremendous amount of peripheral buzz that complicates, hobbles, discourages, distracts from, and get in the way of the simple desire to make an image.
Every so often when reading through the ever-present debates on “X vs. Y”, the supreme importance of such things as metadata, “digital asset” management, keywording, geo-tagging, morals of “manipulation,” and a myriad other extraneous topics, I stop and wonder why so much of the virtual world of photography is not about photographs.
It’s no wonder there is so little creative and innovative image-making out there when so many camera owners spend more time and energy talking and bickering about the practice rather than actually pursuing it. Seriously, if you head into the wild in search of inspiration while your mind is preoccupied with what keywords you should use to optimize the search engine results for any images you might make that day, you may as well tie a boat anchor around your waist before hitting the trail.
While I’m quoting from sci-fi authors, a quip form Philip K. Dick is especially relevant here: “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.” I’m pretty sure we would not have some of our greatest literary creations if authors related to their books and essays as “bleached wood pulp assets,” or chose their titles and narrative based on search engine optimization.
It is the nature of inspiration and spirituality to transcend technical minutia and mundane tangible considerations. If you became a nature photographer because your soul soars and transforms with the power, delicacy, and sensory stimulus of natural forces, stand up right now and shout out “enough!” Get out from behind the computer, strap on your boots and head outside. Touch the leaves, smell the earth, run your fingers on the gritty surface of rocks, listen to the gurgling of water in a stream, watch an insect crawling into a flower, stare at the clouds or stars or ocean waves or mountain tops, listen to the songs of birds – these are the ingredients of great art. Put all else out of your mind, open your heart, and make it your goal to see something you’ve never noticed before.
I’m confident there are no keywords etched anywhere on Michelangelo’s “David” and that Beethoven did not embed optimized metadata in the score of “Pastoral”. In the end, greatness prevails. It may take time to be noticed but great art will always surpass and transcend the mediocre, repetitive, and mundane, no matter what its Google ranking is, whether it’s film or digital, manipulated , found, keyworded, twittered, HDR’d, geo-tagged, cropped, or anti-alias filtered.
“There are no rules for good photographs. There are only good photographs.” –Ansel Adams
If your photographic goal is to inspire and express your creativity; do what you do for the love of it. Everything else is secondary. It’s that simple.
Driftwood Flame
Have We Made Things Too Complicated?
Tags: asset management, camera, dam, digital, google, metadata, nature, photography, seo
Dear applicant,
Our support network is here to see you through the arduous process of becoming assimil… pardon, a successful nature-photo-artist. Our easy-to-follow instructions and friendly staff will answer your questions, guide you through the standard forms, and assist in setting proper boundaries around your powers of creative expression to keep them from getting in your way.
To begin the process, please review our simple ten-step program:
- Your photograph must be un-manipulated. No, we don’t know how to define it. Just say that it is and we’ll call it good.
- Comply with all arbitrary rules for photo competitions even when they indicate an embarrassing ignorance of modern photographic technology. Yes, we know even Ansel Adams’ work would not qualify, but he’s passé anyway.
- What’s in the frame doesn’t matter. Please tell us your edition limits, marketing hype, and why nobody understands you.
- Your art should be accessible. And expensive.
- Beauty is cliché. Do you have anything that will make people angry, suicidal, or at the very least befuddled?
- Please send exorbitant membership fees for our not-for-profit professional association so we can throw elaborate schmooz… we mean networking parties with expensive catering; and pay for a crippling bureaucracy of administrators, committees, and politics.
- We believe in Twitter followers as an indicator of importance. If the quality of your work is insufficient to draw the masses, offer shiny prizes.
- If you use a Large Format camera and/or work exclusively in black-and-white, all other qualifications for art are waived.
- Please provide at least ten examples of photographs you claim as your own that are copies of… we mean tributes to famous photographers.
- 50% commission is fair and equitable and in everyone’s best interest.
The Art Community is here for you!
I’m from the Art Community and I’m Here to Help!Tags: art, landscape, nature, photography
“Today, indeed, you can find urban white artists — people who could not reliably tell a coyote from a german shepherd at a hundred feet — casually incorporating the figure of Coyote the Trickster into their work. A premise common to all such efforts is that power can be borrowed across space and time. It cannot. There’s a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced.”
–David Bayles and Ted Orland / Art & Fear
What experience do you associate with your favorite work? When you revisit an image of an epic moment, do you remember waking up to a silent dawn in the desert, quietly starting the day in semi-darkness, brewing coffee and sweet oatmeal by the embers of last night’s campfire, taking in the rich scents of wild vegetation, listening to the early birds as the sky slowly turns purple and lavender, first rays glistening through a myriad of tiny dew drops, perhaps with several days’ stubble on your face and down to your last pair of still-usable socks, photographing a nearby scene in the warm light and feeling energized for a new day of exploring wild places, both outside of and within yourself? Or, do you vaguely remember waking up to a rude alarm clock in a generic motel room, grabbing bad coffee at a 24-hour gas station convenience store, behind the wheel of a rental car, frenzied driving in the dark through unknown scenery en route to grabbing the icon shot at dawn before heading back to town to kill time before sunset? Both scenarios may yield beautiful images and the viewer may never know the difference, but you do!
If you got the shot but missed the experience; got bragging rights but never broke a sweat; got the trophy without playing the game; met beauty but never got introduced; was it really worth it?
I was asked the other day if I had images from places outside my proverbial back yard of the Western US. I do, in fact, but the meanings they hold for me relate more to the trips themselves and the companions I traveled with, and not so much to the places photographed. I worked hard to make a home for myself in my favorite place in the world, not only for the joy of being here, but also for the opportunity to get to know it better and develop a more meaningful relationship with it. There is no substitute for time and familiarity when it comes to the depth of one’s work. I take pride in knowing each plant and critter, canyon, wash, mesa and lake, by name, even the ones yet to be formally named by others.
My work stems from my relationship with the places and things I photograph. The more profound the experience and the more personal the interaction, the more meaningful are the images to me; and that is why I do what I do.
Within a few miles of my house I am apt to stumble upon ancient sculpted arrow points and shards of decorated pottery. There are rock art panels thousands of years old right by the road. As a viewer they are fascinating and exciting to me, but they are other people’s art and not mine to make anew. I make my own art in my own day and perhaps an observer like myself in the far future may be similarly intrigued by my work and it may spark the same fascination with times and knowledge no longer in existence. For that to happen, my work must reflect my own ideas and inspiration. In order to be meaningful, it must portray my own understanding and fascination. The images must result from my own interpretations and experiences.
Desert Brush
As the topic relates to my own recent musings, I wanted to recommend a couple of blog posts from fellow photographers offering different and interesting perspectives:
Paul Grecian wrote: If a Painting Falls in the Woods…
and Carl Donohue followed with: The art of nature
Great reading and brain-starters for the day. Thanks to both!
Guy
Interesting Perspectives on ArtAlthough this post was written at the request of a friend who wanted a narrative to be used for commercial promotion of Fine Art Photography, in truth it was a long time coming and something I have been pondering for quite a while. It is also a precursor to a larger set of essays aimed at the creative photographer that is currently in the making and which I hope to offer as an e-book in the near future.
–
Some may claim that art is a concept that defies definition. The term had been historically used so broadly and in so many different contexts that any attempt to describe it in a meaningful and applicable way may be an exercise in futility. And surely, dictionaries and encyclopedias don’t make the task any easier. By most formal definitions, art can be a noun or an adjective (and some would even argue its use as a verb.) It can refer to aesthetics or skill, objects or concepts, representations of reality, or bare abstractions.
And yet, two common threads appear to exist among all manifestations of art: creativity and skill. Creativity is that which conceives of thing that had not existed before. Skill is the ability to convert such conceptions into tangible manifestations. Art is a product of the two. One alone will not do. Skill without creativity is the realm of craftsmen, and carries its own utility and rewards. Creativity without skill, on the other hand, is a truly unfortunate fate and will surely doom a person to a life of frustration and unfulfilled desires.
Enter “Fine Art.” While relying on the concept of art as defined above, the term “fine arts” – rooted in the French “beaux arts” – is used specifically to describe those realms of art created solely for their aesthetic qualities and for the enrichment of the human experience through expressions of beauty rather than utility. It is the distinction which separates a graceful sculpture from a well-crafted ornamental column, a painting from an illustration, a temple from other works of architecture, a poem from an essay and, as it pertains to photography of natural things, it is what separates the unique expression of a photographer’s inspiration from the documentary image.
Certainly documentary images can be made that possess immense beauty — a beauty inherent in the subjects themselves. This alone does not qualify such images as examples of fine art as they lack a critical ingredient to qualify as art in the first place: creativity.
Further, all art is a product of human thought, imagination, and intuition. The fact that a naturally-occurring phenomenon by itself is perceived as beautiful does not alone make it an incarnation of art. Its unique use by a human artist, expressing beauty through a composition and/or presentation of their own making, does.
In promoting photographic images as works of fine art, implicit statements are made: the work is unique and represents the personal sensibilities of the artist and, while it may carry any degree of resemblance to real subjects and events, such documentary bindings are not its primary concern and may well not exist at all. It is to be regarded as a manufactured product of the artist’s own creation.
Along with skill and aesthetics, where it comes to placing value on works of fine art, originality should also carry a decisive weight. Copies of compositions originated by other artists, where they can be identified, should not be considered on par with unique personal work of the artist’s own making. This applies to photographs to the same degree that it applies to paintings, sculptures, writings, or other means of creating art. The ethical photographer should give credit where due when knowingly presenting an image conceived of the labors and creative gifts of another.
Art, however you choose to define it, is ultimately a product of the human mind. Photographs, before assuming any other meaning, are essentially products of machines. Natural phenomena are manifestations of forces altogether independent of, and oblivious to, the emotions and meanings ascribed to them by human beings. In order for nature photography to enter the realm of the fine arts, the creative photographer must find a way to relate these three elements to one another in a meaningful way.
It therefore baffles me to encounter statements by self-described artists who proclaim to do nothing beyond capturing the scene in front of them, just as it would have appeared to anyone else who happened to be passing by, and essentially serving as little more than chauffeurs for their cameras rather than taking an active, decisive, role in expressing their own creative interpretation of the subjects photographed. If there is nothing of the artist in the frame, then what makes it art?
There is certainly admirable skill involved in transporting one’s camera to unique locations and times when interesting phenomena unfolds; and successfully recording and sharing such moments. But, no matter how impressive the result, the qualification of “art” requires an extra step: personal interpretation.
A recent survey of photographic outlets reveals that a significant portion of the US nature photographer population was competing for a spot at Yosemite’s Horsetail Falls these past couple of weeks. Apparently another sizable group was lining up to capture similar copies of the Badwater salt flats in Death Valley at dawn. The results are predictably beautiful or, rather, beautiful BUT predictable.
Art is a product of the self. Mobs do not create art. Copies of art are copies, of art.
Certainly all of us photographed familiar places at one time or another, and likely even captured compositions identical to those of other photographers but there’s a distinct line between checking known recognizable locations off a list and creating art.
This is not meant as a judgment against either school. There is certainly great joy to be had in visiting magnificent places, whether they’ve been photographed before or not. But, if my own experience is of any value, such joy pales in comparison to creating something truly and uniquely yours, weaving the experience of your own personal discovery, interpretation, excitement, curiosity, awe, and wonder into something never before seen, if only just a personal variation on a theme.
Explore for yourself, experience for yourself, and share your own creativity. Be more than just a driver for your camera.
Tags: art, artist, nature, photography
Anyone seeking inspiration, and a rare glimpse into the life and work of one of the American West’s greatest photographers, will do well to spend some time reading David Leland Hyde’s new blog “Landscape Photography Blogger“.
David is the son of photographer and wilderness activist Philip Hyde and offers, among tributes to his father’s photographic and environmental work, a moving narrative of his life.
Reader Recommendation: Landscape Photography BloggerTags: american west, environment, landscape, philip hyde, photography
I am temporarily severed from my image files and camera gear so no photographs this time around. The vacuum is filled with facts and a feeble attempt to grasp their meaning.
If I were to travel at the speed of light (roughly 670,000,000 mph) I would reach the other edge of the Milky Way in about 100,000 years. The Milky Way is but one galaxy out of over 100,000,000,000 in the observable(!) universe, some of which are home to over 1,000,000,000,000 stars each, many not unlike our own sun, many far larger. And oh, that is just a tiny part of the universe. The other 95% or so is made of dark matter and dark energy which we know little about. And then there are dimensions of existence beyond our limited perception of mere space and time.
I think of all the beauty and knowledge and experiences out there to be had, and of the realization that I will never know or experience or understand even a minute sliver of it.
Let me at least revel in the knowledge that so much is yet out there and that the struggles of one life, even one species, even one planet, or one galaxy, don’t amount to much. The particles and energy that make who I am today may yet return as something altogether different, but what of my consciousness and memories and revelations?
Frustrations Of A Self-Aware MindApparently not much, at least as it pertains to the goal of photographic technology. It seems comical that modern day film aficionados tout the benefits of a product that was really just meant to make life simpler and easier in the days of glass plates. Film ads of the 1800s and early 1900s boasted such benefits as “simplicity”, “no darkroom”, “don’t break”, and “cleaner, simpler, pleasanter than the old days”.
And now we can add “no chemicals”, “no incremental costs”, and “process and print in the comfort of your own home”.
Advancements in photographic technology were always aimed at eliminating distractions, freeing the photographer to focus (no pun intended) on making images rather than tools and processes.
How curious it is that some people can wake up in the morning, adjust the thermostat on the wall, retrieve food from an electric refrigerator, microwave their breakfast, shower using indoor plumbing, hop in a motorized vehicle, ride the elevator to the office, and bring up their electronic mailbox without batting an eye, yet froth at the mouth at the mention of using the same technologies for the simple task of recording images.
How strange to see people using the computer-powered(!) media to accuse computer imaging technology of anything from “cheating” to “the death of God’s light”. How silly will these proclamations seem to someone reading them 130 years from now?
As glass plates were in the early days of film, so is film today (to borrow Kodak’s own perfectly-phrased term) “impedimenta heretofore necessary” but no longer…
Let us now make great images. By any means.
Tags: ad, advertisement, digital, film, glass plate, kodak