LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process

In music, when you go to a concert hall you have a pretty good idea what kind of music you're going to hear. Same could be said for the local pub, or even a street musician. But when you go to a photography gallery, you have no idea what type of photography you're about to see, and that can be a serious challenge that we should address so our audience is at least a little prepared.

In Guy Tal's book More Than a Rock, he divides photography into either representational imagery or creative imagery. Using a camera to reproduce what the world looks like is, by far, the most common use of photography. So if your project uses photography to create a metaphor, it's a good idea to tell your audience that. Otherwise you run the risk of them interpreting your image as strictly representational.

The panorama image has a marvelous built-in storytelling capability. There can be a subject on the left side of the panorama that's all involved in something interesting, and a different subject on the right side of the panorama that's also involved in something interesting. But where a panorama really shines is when the left side and the right side establish a narrative or comparison that goes beyond either of their separate stories.

Dreams and wish fulfillment have a place in life, and I suppose that goes for photography, too. But I must confess that the romanticized and idealized landscape gets tiring after a while. It's like desserts that are too sweet; the first few bites might be satisfying, but desserts as a steady diet become unbearable.

The spectacular sunset, the unusual landscape, the extraordinarily beautiful model, the once in a century event. I can appreciate all of these kinds of photography, but the way these extreme moments seduce us into pursuing the unusual does a disservice to the art of seeing.

I could not even begin to estimate how many hours of my life have been spent joyfully in the photography section of bookstores. The hunt for some previously unknown treasure are some of the most pleasant hours of my life. I miss those days.

While you are on the way to some destination location that promises great photography, don't overlook the scenes you drive by. They may be even better.

I give up. I've read no less than two dozen essays in which the writer / photographer attempts to explain what Stieglitz was getting at with his concept of equivalence and his pictures of clouds and trees. Perhaps I'm just too dense to grasp it all, but it always seems like another example of lipstick on a pig. His photographs are beautiful, but all the philosophical musings he can heap on it don't seem to make them more interesting.

We all know that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but you can sometimes make an interesting piece of artwork out of an otherwise mundane or even crummy photograph. Extreme processing opens up possibilities that can often become quite interesting.

I've been involved with photography for 50 years now and I can't imagine not being involved in photography somehow. But I know that's not true for everyone. I've been around long enough to see people's interests wax and wane in photography and I've always been fascinated by their stories.

There are two aspects of photography, the science and the art. In my youth, I thoroughly overemphasized the science and pursued precision that, in retrospect, were perfectly meaningless. For example, I didn't control the temperature of my film developers to 68° plus or minus a degree, but used sophisticated mercury thermometers to control the temperatures to plus or minus a tenth of a degree. All of which took considerable energy and sophisticated logistics, but didn't improve my artwork one whit.

Working a collection of images into a refined project often involves trying to identify those images that are odd ducks, that is, the ones that just don't seem to fit with the rest of them as comfortably as they should. It might be a matter of content, it might be a matter of composition, it might be a matter of any number of factors. The challenge is to find those odd ducks and decide if they're out because they're odd, or in because they make an important contrast to the rest of the images.

When it comes to interpreting your artwork, there seems to be two schools of thought. The contemporary thinking is that we should allow viewers to interpret our work any way they want. I'm not buying it. Besides, how would you know how to compose or process an image if you have no intent?

Having a consistency in the aesthetic of a project is important, but that can become a challenge with the original media are different.

Camera manufacturers keep trying to seduce us to buy their latest models with the promise that it will eliminate the barriers to our success. I want those barriers because overcoming difficulties is the heart of artmaking.