When thou shalt have allotted me my fire I will not fare here from the dark again. As living men we'll no more sit apart from our companions, making plans. The day of wrath appointed for me at my birth engulfed and took me down.
Homer
Making not producing
I’ve been reading "The meaning in the making" by Sean Tucker. In discussing Logos, he asks “do we want to elicit a favourable response from others by playing to the crowd, or do we want to speak the Truth as we see it with the things we make"
I've been thinking about that and how it relates to my relationship with Instagram. The process of creating and the posting to instagram and hoping for likes is crushing any sense of Truth in my practice. The pursuit of Likes is an end unto itself and each time I post there, I find I hate photography just a little more.
But then how do you get feedback? How can you grow as an artist?
I think its the relationship between the art and the viewer that has been damaged by instagram. The conversation reduced to impressions and likes. A race to the bottom, No meaning just content.
I want to get back to making, communicating the Truth as I experience it. To creating rather than producing.
So I'm going to focus more on publishing here, on my blog. I've no idea if you'll see it, I've no idea if you'll like it. Maybe when we talk you'll tell me. Or perhaps give me the gift l most want; constructive feedback.
To start with, a photo of my beautiful wife Maura. who gives me more love and support than I could ask for, And probably more than I deserve.
Playing with colour
Red Series #1
I am a black and white shooter. There. I’ve said it. I love black and white. I love the timeless, structural nature of it. I love the gradation away into darkness. Colour has always felt cheaper. Too close to the humdrum of daily existence. No drama. Plus, I have always been bored with my own colour photos and struggled to find an anchor to the image.
Recently I watched one of the Art of Photography videos on the Photo Assignments. If you haven’t watched Ted Forbes video’s I highly recommend them. Watch one, make notes, go shoot.
This video opened my eyes a bit to the possibilities of color - https://youtu.be/bAWZ9PtZ4uw
In black and white photography, I focus on separation of the subject (or subjects) from the rest of the world to bring focus and drama to the photo. Using framing, depth of field, and a few other techniques I try to draw the viewer’s eye to the purpose of the photo. Maybe colour can be one more technique? By using tension in the colour palette of the photo (along with framing, depth of field, etc) the subject can be further separated from the rest of the photo.
For this series I focused on red. I mostly live in Vancouver where there is a lot of green, so red seems to “pop” more for me.
What the hell is an artist?
Help with inspiration?
My background is science. Microbiology to be specific. Now I spend my professional life listening to complex problems and trying to help people navigate their way through to an acceptable computer solution to those problems. Although the problems can be messy and ill defined, success (and failure) usually is a little easier to tie down. You know when a job is done well, when a customer is happy. You complete a project and tie it up with a nice little bow and move on.
But what about photography? How do you know when you are doing well? How do you measure success? What is success?
When I approach a technical problem I usually start from the end. I imagine what the end state will look like and then work back to where we currently are. It’s like doing a maze on a paper. If you start from the end all the options fall away and you are left with a clear path back to the start. My wife calls this cheating. I don’t know if I agree with that.
So let’s start there. What is success with photography? Riches? World renown? A little positive feedback?
Actually I haven’t got a clue. Maybe a little bit of all? Maybe none of the above. And if I don’t know I can’t use my normal process. I’m an analyst at sea, no starting point.
In this case it is easy to try and think of your whole life as an end point and forget there is the slight matter of living life. Even if I could say my end goal is to be a famous photographer, I’d have to get there. And to do that my photos would have to not only be good, but they’d have to have value. No paintings of dogs playing cards please!
So then what about another problem solving technique? Find different but similar problem space and look for solutions there? This is a bit of a hackneyed example, but let’s talk about Mozart and Beethoven for a moment. Both produced transcendent works of art. Both look impressive in brass statues. Both have inspired countless humans since their times. But they were remarkably different as artists.
By all accounts Mozart was a truly unique individual. The music flowed effortlessly, intuitively. A stone cold child prodigy. Enough to make mere mortals weep. It makes me sad to say, I’m no Mozart.
But what of Beethoven? Someone who wrestled huge gorillas of self doubt and torment. Someone who had to make endless mistakes to move forward an inch. Now there is someone to take inspiration from.
Maybe an artist is really a process. Not an end state but (trying not to sound like a pretentious fool here) the progression and development of a set of skills. Maybe it is not grandiose delusions of fame but small incremental steps. Slow improvement and investigation into technique and history. Maybe art is not the product but the steps the work that go into creating it.
Finding a voice
Everything is interesting on the way to lessons
To start with, photography is easy. Get a camera take some photos, get a bit better. Life is good and gratification flows. Then it starts to get more complicated. You start to want to improve. You compare your photos against images that define a generation and obviously they come up short. So your ego takes a knock, but you soldier on, and you start to research more. Hours are lost to the internet.
And then it seems so many of us get caught by reviews of cameras. Of flashes, lenses, light meters. In the search to become better photographers we take a wrong turn and obsess about gear, like that is the route to good photos. It’s easy to see why on reflection. Technology is a physical thing. You can compare one piece to another. You can say this sensor has a higher resolution than this sensor. This shutter is faster than that shutter. On the internet review and technology sites abound.
And so you get lost in the world of technology but your photos don’t really improve much. They just become technically better versions of the same boring photos that you could take before. Higher resolution. More space in your hard drive. More time invested in a death spiral of technology, but no worth in the photos you produce. And no gratification.
I think everyone who becomes interested in being a photographer runs this risk. I know I have wasted years on obsessing about which is the perfect camera and system. And wasted a very large amount of money too but still failed to be satisfied about my own progression as a photographer.
The problem is it’s easy to look at technology but hard to look at artistry.
Artistry begins with imagining what you want to say, what you want to achieve. With an understanding of your materials. With research into other works, both in your field and outside of your field. It develops through repetition and refinement. But it begins with finding a voice. And that voice isn’t on the internet, and it certainly isn’t on a review site.