Loss and purpose

Some words in contemporary discourse are used too much and thought about too little. At the same time, I heard that the use of another set of words, words such as kindness and mercy, has been declining since the mid-twentieth century at least. It matters because the words we use indicate the state of our minds, our hearts, and our intentions. Words like spiritual seem to be used a fair amount; describing yourself as “spiritual but not religious” is a common expression. We talk freely about rights, dreams, goals, and describe things—including people—as being out of the mainstream, or even radical.

At the same time, the analysis I referred to shows that words like mercy and responsibility show up with decreasing frequency in published writing and in audio transcriptions over the past 50-70 years.

At the moment, our culture is focused on achievement, on prevailing through the struggles of life, on ultimately winning the contest of life. If there’s a problem with this way of thinking—and I believe there is—it’s that human life is not a contest that needs to be, or even can be, won.

I think artmaking reflects this idea. Win all you want or all you can. In a hundred years, you’ll be just as dead as Julius Caesar, and less than a hundred years from that time, few people, if any, will have any inkling that you ever existed. Furthermore, whether you’re one of life’s great winners or someone who must accept a humbler existence, you will encounter loss as your life unfolds. Ultimately, the only “art” to living is to make of those losses, something that nourishes others.” That quote is from the physician and writer, Rachel Naomi Remen. Dr. Remen was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease as a teenager, and wasn’t expected live much beyond her 40th birthday. She devoted a significant portion of her career to teaching students in medical school the value of listening to their patients, as well as attending to their own feelings in response to the losses they suffer through the setbacks and sufferings of their patients.

We are not here to win. Such a statement is all but heresy in the secular theology of a culture based on market capitalism. But we are not, like or not, accept it or not. We are here to live, to give voice to our own astonishment, the words of the great writer, Annie Dillard.

Cultivating a serious practice in art making can help us remain grounded, can keep us focused on what sustains and enlarges life, and can help us avoid being taken in by the shallow and ephemeral nature of consumer culture. Yet the way forward in the practice of making art might be experienced as an exercise in frustration and failure more than a way toward peaceful fulfillment of our creativity. And if you approach other careers in that same spirit, I believe the statement still holds that you’re likely to experience periods of giving a lot of effort to gain a result that might not have been what you sought or intended.

But we’re not called to win, to have everything go right, or even to struggle and achieve some measure of success, even it’s intermittent. The call of life, of vocation, of truth is the call to keep pushing forward, even when we can’t see the way. The call to make art, or better, live our lives in an artful way regardless of whether our work is considered “artistic” is to find a worthwhile direction and begin the journey in that direction, but then to keep going even when the path is dark and outcome uncertain.

The reward or the reward for the effort, for the sacrifice, the payoff, is integrity, a life that can hold our own respect years from now, when the current culture of today has morphed into something else, and possibly left us behind.

Art as transaction

The dancer and choreographer, Twyla Tharp, got me thinking about the relationship between artists and their audience members with an interesting thought that she presented in her book, The Creative Habit:

Everyone who presents his or her work to the public eventually realizes that there’s a quasi-legal transaction between artist and audience… You feel gypped when the [artist] breaks the contract.

There’s certainly something to that. A humorist is supposed to make you laugh. A mystery writer is supposed to build a murderous maze and then lead you out of it. A musician sets a mood and then within that mood creates and resolves tension. A choreographer presents bodies moving through space. On one level, the dancers defy the physical limitations of an average human, as well as the restrictions of gravity. The dance itself also defies the chaotic, often random nature of moving objects. But on another level, the choreographer and dancers connect the audience to universal emotions and ancestral impulses.

And a photographer… does… selfies?

Just kidding.

We do similar stuff. The pictures that move me the most connect me to landscapes, they awaken memories, maybe deep memories, and they evoke emotions and awaken those same ancestral impulses that Ms. Tharp referred to.

Yet to take any single point of view, any one breakdown of an artistic performance or piece of work and conclude that that’s the one, that that’s what art is, misses the relational nature of art. And in that misunderstanding, we set aside the capacity for change, for growth, for the opportunity to deepen our appreciation of ourselves, our fellow travelers on the journey through life, and for a richer apprehension of the wonder of it all.

Maybe what we’re ultimately seeking in our work, and in our interaction with artwork that speaks most clearly to each of us, is less a transaction than a conversation.

A transaction includes an element of choice—I’d like this one over here, not that one over there—and we offer some form of compensation, whether it’s currency for a shirt or a bag of potatoes; time, as well as money, for a movie, concert or play; or devoting our time and attention to visual art. But with all due acknowledgement to post-sale marketing and the ongoing relationship we have with many of the products and services we buy, the transaction itself happens once, and then it’s over.

When art resonates with an audience member, he or she can return to it again and again. In fact, when art works really well for someone, the work itself seems to come back to that person. When this happens, the work seems like it’s gotten under our skin, or like we can’t get it out of our head. We notice things we hadn’t seen or heard before, or we go back to parts of the work that we noticed earlier, but that hold more significance for us now. When this happens, at least for me, it can seem that piece of art that I’m responding to changes, revealing more, or deeper, meaning over time. But it’s we, the audience, who change. We become different people, people who have changed through our experience of life, as we learn more, as we absorb the pain of our own struggles and defeats, the joys of our successes and victories, and the poignant realization of the inevitable connection between victory and defeat. We change as we experience success and failure, and as we gain a deeper realization of the fact of our own aliveness, even as we age and grow closer to our death.

This isn’t sad or depressing. As we mature I think we realize satisfaction that’s tinged with myriad memories, perceptions and emotions. It’s not the shallow sense of “Wow, life keeps getting better and better!!!” Rather, it’s the understanding that life is hard, and beautiful, and surprising, and wondrous, and worth every moment of struggle. That realization can continue to unfold for us throughout our life, and a relationship with artwork, an ongoing conversation with it, can enhance it.

Verbal descriptions of visual art

Today’s thought experiment is that if you can accurately and thoroughly describe a piece of visual art, a photography, a painting, a sketch or drawing or the like, that piece of artwork has failed at some level as art.

Understanding where that come came from begins through stating the obvious: we comprehend, we take in, visual art through our sense of vision. It we approach a statement in our painting or photography that defies verbal description that work more likely adheres to its medium.

Photographers has used terms like simplicity, mystery, beauty, light, color and gesture to articulate what they’re trying to convey through visual depiction of line, shape, texture, color and the rest. A term like mystery might clear enough in that it’s expressing something that resists simply, unambiguous description. A term like gesture, when applied to visual imagery, can be confusing to a general audience who thinks of term as a bodily movement that affirms or emphasizes, or maybe precludes, a spoken message. But the average person doesn’t typically associate gesture as an element of an image, or as the defining feature of the subject of an image. Yet it’s that very characteristic—inarguably there, and at the same time, very difficult to pin down—that makes it so effective.

When a subject is as obvious as a hillside covered with foliage in its brilliant fall color scheme of reds and golds, with a still lake in the foreground and old, weathered rowboat sitting in the lake, reflecting in the still water, there’s not a lot of mystery there. Even the gesture is so obvious that it loses what’s compelling about the scene. That’s not to say the scene isn’t beautiful, peaceful, compelling even, as it is. Yet nothing in that image suggests something ambiguous, brings out the mysterious, or raises a question that will engage a viewer in anything beyond the obvious.

The mottled yellow and brown leaf that doesn’t look like much as you walk past it gives a photographer or painter material to work with. If you can find the gesture in that subject that stops someone and compels them to look again, you do the work of an artist, and you’ve succeeded in a more challenging task than capture a pretty picture.

Stopping the voice—by letting it speak

I'm reading a book called The Untethered Soul, by Michael Singer, which I haven't finished. In fact, I'm less than halfway through it. But Singer began by describing the voice that each of us has, the internal voice that represents our consciousness to ourselves. It observes where we are, and what's happening to us and around us. It also provides commentary on all of that from inside ourselves. The voice often criticize us, as well as others, and frequently tells us what we should or should not do. It's strikingly wrong an appalling amount of the time. 

Michael Singer is hardly the first person to have noticed this voice, this aspect of ourselves. It's what some writers have called the internal editor, or internal critic. It's what the writer Steven Pressfield calls resistance. It's the thing we have to learn to ignore if we ever do anything significant, that is, if we ever set the judgment and criticism of the rest of the world aside and do what matters to us. We might fail, but probably we won't fail completely. What's more likely is that the extent of our success will be less than we hoped for or simply different from what we envisioned for ourselves. That probably has more to do with a flaw in our expectations, than with our ability to do whatever we set out to do.

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the voice is that it doesn't stop. If we're mentally and emotionally healthy, we have enough ability to turn our attention away from the voice's chatter and focus on something else for at least a little while. When we can't attend to anything else, when our thoughts loop through the same perceptions and commentary and conclusions over and over, we are in some form of mental impairment, or at the most extreme, mental illness. Yet behind the voice is another presence, another consciousness that can separate itself from the voice and what it's saying. That presence is more who we are. That identity, when you strip away all the labels seems simpler than we usually think of ourselves. I am a husband, father, brother, son, uncle, nephew, writer, photographer, and on and on. But those are labels and roles that I’ve accepted or that society has tacked onto me. Beneath all that, who or what am I? Singer explores that in his book. The salient point here is that our core selves can look at the voice with a degree of separation that we don't take advantage of most of the time.

But we can take advantage of it. If we can't make the voice be quiet, we also don't have to allow it to dominate our consciousness attention. Instead, we can take a figurative step back and just observe what that voice pays attention to, what it says, and how it says it. We don't have to react and in not reacting, we can open ourselves to much more of the reality swirling around us than the voice attends to. And it's less stressful for ourselves and others when we do that.

Increasingly, this approach is essential to me when I'm photographing. By this point in my career as a photographer, I have photographed enough, and maybe in enough places, that I have a collection of shots. More and more, I'm drawn to things that aren't the shot, the grand vista, dramatic view, or as a recent ad for a Photoshop tutorial put it, "the jaw-dropping, heart-stopping, eye-popping" image. So much of life is hyperbolic, attempting to live at 115 percent of capacity, lighting both ends of the candle with blowtorches, as loud and as fast as unreasonably possible. Yet sooner or later, we all end up in the same place. I wonder whether in trying so hard to make a huge impact, we in fact miss many, maybe most of the gifts that are offered to us along the way. In terms of image making, a lot of the most interesting images, the ones that remain interesting over time, usually aren't the most dramatic, eye-popping, jaw-breaking, concussion-producing pictures. The most interesting images—regardless of whether we photograph them—arise from little moments of presence that occur throughout a day. They're moments that keep me going more than all the stuff that's too bright, too loud, too enthusiastic, and too in-my-face.

I realize that the approach I'm defining might be limiting my audience—but that in itself brings up a subject for another blog post: who is the audience for photography. Still what matters more at this point than a huge audience for grandiloquent imagery is producing work that's more authentic for me and that connects with people who respond to the moment of awareness that I experienced when I made the photograph. To the extent that I can do that, I'll achieve a type of success that's deeper than metrics might suggest.

Vision in photography, Part 2

Most of us who come alive when seeing good artwork, especially when making it ourselves, appreciate unique styles, genuine statements that are consistent throughout an artist's body of work. Writers might refer to this consistency as style, or maybe voice. For musicians, the term might be sound. You recognize guitarist, Larry Carlton's, playing because he has a unique sound. Photographers use the term vision to describe a quality of their work that defines each photographer. 

Still, I've found it a bit vexing to try to settle on a description of the concept that’s clear and definite. Former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart expressed the challenge as he sought to define the term, obscenity. Maybe I can't define it absolutely, Stewart said, but I know it when I see it. (Not sure that’s a direct quotation, but it captures the judge's intention.)
Vision is more than the most effective or efficient way of seeing. It includes effective composition, but beyond that, it's something unique to each photographer. Vision can't be taught or transferred from one person to another. It's discovered, and then developed and refined. 

Our vision encapsulates what or maybe how we respond subject matter. It necessarily includes the subject matter that most resonates with us as individuals. It determines what we perceive to be of value in a photograph, what we understand to be worth showing. 
Our ability to recognize and develop our vision is what will enable us to be successful in our art making. And in turn, understanding or recognizing vision in an artist's work can allow us or enable us to respect his work, even if the work isn't consistent with our personal tastes and aesthetics. 

The greatest photographers, the icons, were people who recognized and cultivated extraordinary vision. They include people such as Dorothea Lange, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Arnold Newman, Irving Penn, and many others. Charles Cramer, Cole Thompson and Chuck Kimmerle are artists who are currently working who have extraordinary vision.

Vision is the thing that as photographers we must be true to. Or loyal to. Or faithful or consistent. And it's tough because we don't always know how the next twist or turn in our creative development will unfold. And sometimes we grow by taking steps that don't work out so we can learn from the experience, take a step back and try again. But while I believe the preceding sentence to be true, it’s also the case that our work might develop in ways that aren’t popular with our audience. Bob Dylan has been booed off the stage more than once in his career. But playing electric guitar wasn’t a “wrong” direction for him, even if his audience didn’t appreciate it at first. Or at all! So we need to be patient with the process as it unfolds. And we need to trust that if we're as honest and faithful to our work as we have the strength to be, our efforts will be validated in the end. 
 

Looking for Vision – Part 1

The term vision comes up a lot in photography, which probably sounds like stating the obvious. Still, as ubiquitous as it is, the concept isn't necessarily clear. So I wanted to explore the concept a bit, which led to the following thoughts about vision as it might be applied in critiques, reviews, analysis of photographs. I'll follow it in another, shorter, post that takes on the concept of vision more directly.

Not long after I tried approach making photographs seriously, another photographer offered some feedback on one of my pictures. The substance of the comments isn't important here. What's telling is that he finished his feedback by saying that his comments were just his opinion and that my vision might be different (my emphasis). The comment left me feeling uncomfortable, although it took some time and thought before I could articulate why it bothered me.

If there's a problem with the photograph, I wanted to know what it was. Clearly speaker had an issue with one or more things in the picture and his comments were probably along the lines of what most people who understand the medium would have said. So why not just point out the problem? Backing away from the criticism after stating it suggested that an unspoken message behind the critique: "I think your picture is flawed, but maybe that's just me. Maybe your vision is different; maybe you like pictures that suck." To be fair, that's almost certainly not what the commentator really wanted to communicate. But it would have been better to state the problem, and then stop. The disclaimer wasn't necessary or helpful.

So after some thought, I concluded that two problems exist in critiques of artwork in general, and that especially seem to accompany critiques of photography by photographers who haven't had any guidance in how to analyze pictures.

First is the all but irresistible urge to say whether or not you like a photograph. Second is the tendency to view photographs from the standpoint of expectations, rather than evaluation.

That any of us likes a painting, photograph, or any other piece of artwork is subjective and unreliable as a guide to the quality of work, the market value of the work, or its importance within the medium or genre that it belongs to. Most of us might reasonably hope that our tastes change and become more refined and sophisticated as we learn more about what goes into making art, the history of the medium, and how any given piece fits into the overall body of work in that area. Many of us liked macaroni and cheese and hot dogs when we're 10 years old. By the time we made it to 40 or 50 years old, our tastes in food have often matured, become more sophisticated, and changed for the better. The same can be said for artwork. So liking a piece of artwork doesn't tell us much and doesn't give the artist much useful guidance unless it results in a sale.

A better approach involves stepping back from likes and dislikes, and paying more attention to what we actually see, and then learning to describe what we see. This is easier than we might expect. In fact, it's an easier approach to viewing artwork than trying to make sophisticated appraisal that most of us aren't sophisticated or practiced enough to make. But no evaluation can hold any value without an understanding of what the object of the appraisal actually is. The description can note the general subject of the work (landscape, portraiture, etc.), the specific subject in a specific picture (a landscape photograph of Niagara Falls), what is or isn't in focus, the background or foreground and their relationship to the main subject, the exposure and so on. If this sounds like basic stuff, it is. And that's what the starting point should be.

The next step might consider whether the work fits our expectations and if it doesn't, we can consider whether or not it's appropriate to loosen or broaden our expectations. Art moves forward when it goes beyond expectations and still makes an effective statement. It works best when it incorporates or delivers beauty in the process.

We can be tripped up by being too sophisticated for the intended function of the work. Not every piece of art needs to make a complex statement, much less series of statements or risk being inconsequential. We don't, as viewers and consumers of artwork, need to push beyond our honest reactions to the work. But the reaction will be clearer and will have more value to the artist if it's grounded on what the work is. So beginning an evaluation with a focus on description will be more informative and useful than saying what we like or getting to carried away with involved interpretation.

Moreover, keeping our initial evaluation to a description of the work opens us to the possibility of seeing and appreciating work that is unique, that carries an artist's personal vision rather than rehashing what someone else has already done. It allows us, as viewers and consumers of the work, to be open to unexpected gifts that the work might offer us as viewers.

In the next post, I'll get back to the theme that I originally wanted to explore: vision.

Thoughts on slowing down

Common advice to photographers is that we should slow down when we're photographing. It's fine advice. I wish I'd follow it myself more often. But slowing down is difficult when the rest of life is pressing you to go faster, achieve more, be all you can, and so on. Slowing down might be best applied to how we live our lives.

Somewhere I've heard or read that historically humans have found more mystery in common objects and routine moments. Modern and postmodern people don't seem to do well with mystery. We need to measure things, answer any uncertainty, define the parameters, identify the variables, and measure probabilities. We want to get control so that we can keep things safe and predictable. Who wouldn't want to do that? If someone deliberately and earnestly pursued less stability, wouldn't we consider that mental illness or at least emotional instability?

We don't need to be reckless or naïve in the conduct of our affairs. But we also don't need to have every last aspect of our lives quantified and controlled. It's hard to make artwork, or at least interesting artwork, if you don't allow uncertainty and the possibility of failure into your creative workflow. Yet the same is true in the conduct of our lives.

Years ago, I moved hundreds of miles from home, to a place where I didn't know anyone, with no financial margin for error or emergency. I was younger then and took those actions at a time in my life when it was appropriate, or at least acceptable, to take risks like that. Those actions and that type and degree of risk won't be acceptable to everyone. On the other hand, the greatest benefits that I've realized in life have grown out of the willingness to put myself in a position of vulnerability. Most of the time, it's profoundly uncomfortable to accept vulnerability, to relax into the risk and uncertainty and allow events take their course. Deeply uncomfortable. And yet the greatest benefits that in my life came through my willingness to surrender control of a situation.

The ability to let go often improves my photography, but it's probably been even more beneficial to let go in life. What I'm letting go of includes expectations that others have for me, especially when I've taken those expectations into myself to the point that I can't tell whether I'm working toward my own goal, or a goal someone else had for me. More and more, it seems like our goals are off track. It's not that any particular goal is "bad" or "good." Rather, the direction we're striving for in our lives is often driven by a story that doesn't help.

The writer, Barry Lopez, related a conversation he had with a native American, in which they discussed the purpose of stories and the role of story tellers. The overarching purpose of any story is that it should help us. The Indian man that Lopez spoke with said that one could be a story teller as long as his or her stories helped. But when your stories help, you're not the story teller any more, even if you say that you are.

The overriding narratives of our lives is that competition is intense and requires ever greater effort on our part. Too often that point is an assumption that's left insufficiently examined. We need to slow down and examine our assumption and have the courage to dismiss the story tellers in our lives when the stories no longer help.

Blog in development

I haven't especially needed an online presence before this. And it didn't seem that the world needed another blog or web site. So this is my first attempt at being online. More to come in the next few weeks.