To Keep and Bear Civil Society – Part 1 of 3

A couple recent news stories reminded me of something that happened to me in a Walmart parking lot a few years ago. My recollection of some of the details is a fuzzy now, but I remember the key part of what happened that day clearly enough.  

I’d parked my car in the parking lot, went toward the store. Maybe I finished shopping or maybe I’d returned to the car before entering the store. I don’t remember now and that’s not really important at this point. But I glanced into the car through the window and noticed some items, storage bags or pouches or something on the floor behind the front seats that I didn’t recognize. My wife drives the car sometimes and it was possible that these were her items, but usually I notice things like that. So, I opened the back door of the car, a 2007 Toyota Corolla, and bent down to see what the unrecognized items were. I always locked my car; I always used the keyless button to unlock it. I imagine that I used the keyless fob to unlock the car as I always do. I didn’t pay any attention to whether the button actually unlocked the car. When I pulled on the door handle, the door opened. 

As I was bent over in the back seat, I heard a voice asking, “What are you doing in my car!” The voice was close and clearly was addressing me. I probably replied with something profound like, “(Shoot!) I’m in the wrong car!! Um, Sorry!!!!” The owner of the car was calm and very gracious. He looked around and pointed to a ’07 Corolla a couple rows away, the same color, and asked if that was my car. It was. I thanked the owner of the car I entered by mistake for being reasonable and forgiving (I think; I hope I did), and each of us went on our way.  

Over the next several minutes, the surprise and embarrassment dissipated. I imagine that both of us went on with our day and soon forgot about this incident. The news stories that I referred to at the beginning of this piece included separate reports of people who were shot when they inadvertently went to a wrong house, and one story where a six-year-old girl and her dad were both shot when they went into a yard to retrieve a ball. I opened someone’s car, which wasn’t locked but I went into it nonetheless, and was forgiven for it. Fortunately. Unfortunately, someone merely knocked on a door by mistake and was shot for that. That person might live. Someone else drove into someone’s driveway, by mistake, and was turning her car around to leave when she was shot. That driver didn’t survive. 

Obviously, the people who were shot in these incidents were negatively impacted. I hope that the people who did the shooting have enough empathy, enough of a conscious, enough of a sense of humanity that they experienced some remorse for what they did. But I can’t know that for sure. What we can say with certainty is that if those folks didn’t have firearms, they wouldn’t have shot anyone. And we’d all be better off if  that had been the case.  

After an earlier mass shooting, I wrote down some thoughts about the second amendment, but never did anything with them until now. I’ve posted that piece, which follows as part two of this three-part post.

To Keep and Bear Civil Society – Part 2 of 3

Five people, some if not all teenagers, were injured in a shooting event at a home in Zion, Illinois the earlier this year. That became the motivation for writing down some thoughts about gun violence. Most mornings I pull up the current edition of three newspapers that I subscribe to: The Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times. I learned about the event in Illinois from a story in the Chicago Tribune.  

When some high-profile mass shootings took place in November, it was reported that there’d been more than 600 mass shootings – events in which four or more people were killed or wounded by guns. If that statistic is accurate, by the end of November 2022 2,400 people had been killed in mass shooting events. Others died as or were injured as victims of gun violence in incidents that claimed fewer than four victims, say from suicide or domestic violence. People with diverse credentials have offered explanations of what might cause someone to shoot multiple strangers and I’m not qualified to weigh in on that. But the United States is the only place where so many of these kinds of events, these tragedies, happen so often. Recent reporting says that there are 450 million guns in a nation of about 400 million people; we have more guns than people.  

On occasion I've had conversations about guns with people and sometimes ask them what the second amendment says. If I'm not speaking with someone who advocates the unlimited proliferation of guns, the person will often say that they don't know. If I'm speaking with someone who supports gun ownership they invariably recite the second of two statements that the second amendment makes. Some people argue that there’s no reason to have fewer guns in our society because the second amendment to the constitution gives everyone the right to a gun. But that’s not what the second amendment says.  

I’m not a lawyer, judge, or constitutional scholar. But I spent most of my working life writing, editing and publishing technical documentation, so I do know how to read and understand English prose. While I acknowledge that courts, including the United States Supreme Court, have handed down rulings that contradict my argument, it’s not my purpose to relitigate the corresponding cases, nor to critique any court’s rulings. My purpose is to examine what the second amendment to the United States constitution actually says.  

Let's look at the actual amendment for a moment and see what it says (the link takes you to //constitution.congress.gov):  

A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.  

The amendment consists of a single sentence that contains two statements. One is a declarative statement, which is a statement of fact. The second is an imperative statement, which issues a command or direction.  

Some examples of a declarative statement include the following: My car is red. I often wear glasses. There are two televisions in my house. My car is not red. The fact that the statement is incorrect doesn’t change its classification as a declarative sentence.  

Some examples of imperative statements include the following: Zip up your jacket before you go outside. Have a good time. Please pass the salt.  

An example of a single sentence that contains both a declarative statement and an imperative statement is: Don't shoot me, I'm only the messenger.  

In this case, the declarative statement, I'm only the messenger, provides the reason or basis for the imperative statement, don't shoot me. As I read the second amendment, the same structure is there, the declarative statement [paraphrased], we need militias to defend the nation, provides the justification for the imperative statement that congress may not restrict the right to keep and bear [firearms].  

When we speak or write sentences with that construction today, it’s typical to position the imperative statement before the declarative statement. Maybe reversing the order of the two statements, which requires adding the word because, would make it a little clearer and easier to remember: The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed [because] a well-regulated militia [is] necessary to the security of a free state.  

But there’s a problem. We no longer defend the nation through the use of militias. Moreover, the only militias I’m aware of that exist now are unregulated and they pose more of a threat to the peace and security of society than they help to ensure it. So, what does it say about us that every citizen to has a right to have the means to kill another person? What does it say about our society that we’re so passionate about having the means to kill each other right at hand? Is that the society we really want?  

I can’t answer those questions for anyone else, but I’ll offer some additional thoughts in the third and final post on this subject.

To Keep and Bear Civil Society – Part 3 of 3

I concluded the preceding post by asking some questions. What does it mean for every citizen to have right to immediate access to the means to kill another person right to hand, more and more in public places? What does it say about our society that we so strongly feel the need to have the means to kill each other with us at all times? Is that the society we really want?  

Guns are part of our culture and changing that aspect of our culture, even if more of us wanted to, won't happen quickly. There'll be many, many more mass shootings before such a change happens. But maybe a few of us could begin to speak more honestly about the idea of the right to carry around devices whose only purpose is to kill living things. What if we repealed the existing second amendment and replaced it with one that's more appropriate to the times we live in and that enshrines both the right to keep and bear lethal weapons, along with some clarification of rational limitations to that right within the constitution? Maybe we could also consider whether any of us can have the right to access places where the freedom from the possibility of gun violence can be legally enforced. 

I don’t think most people are as cavalier as it seems with respect to the shooting of people who pose no threat to them, especially children, which is how it appears given the lack of action by governing bodies to take strong action to stop such violence. But despite the fact that most people want gun violence reduced, the reality is that we are not doing anything to make that happen. Pretty much the only action that’s been taken by legislative bodies has been to pass legislation that actually expands the ability of gun owners to carry concealed weapons in public. Not exactly an attempt to address the problem. How should we even think about this? 

Somewhere I read a sentence that seems almost nonsensical at first glance: It’s not about what it’s about. It makes more sense though if we take a real-life example. Consider a married couple arguing over how to arrange items in a storage space. Let’s also assume that our imaginary couple is struggling to cope with some financial issues. The energy that drives the surface-level argument – how do we arrange our stuff – is really driven by another issue – money – that they haven’t resolved, and that they might not even feel comfortable discussing. However, their disagreement about how to organize their stuff ends up, it probably won’t be that satisfying because they haven’t resolved the real issue.  

Maybe what drives political polarization and the anger we feel because things are moving in the wrong direction, might arise from who we think we are, how we see ourselves, and how we think others see us. It’s not that we’re trying to resolve what makes us uncomfortable by shooting each other. Rather, we’re trying to wrest a meaningful, or at least a basic, level of control and security from a culture that affords most of us little to no security and that often seems to denigrate the very things that give our lives dignity and meaning.  Too many of us hold the perception that our society doesn’t even respect who we are. And I believe these are common concerns regardless of where we live, our race or gender, our political or religious affiliation. Of course, what “side” you’re on probably determines what you think the goals are, and what the steps toward achieving those goals should be.

So, how do we go forward? More guns? We’re awash in guns and that’s not helping. It’s stating the obvious, yet it must be stated: Having more guns in society hasn’t made society safer. Do we pass more laws that restrict what we can read, how we can express ourselves, who we can marry, and that remove the possibility of choice over our own reproductive decisions? In other words, do we pass laws that suppress the people who aren’t like us, the bad people. That’s not what most of us want either.  

Before we pass more laws that discourage expression or that do still more to promote the proliferation of guns, it would be in our interest to give sober consideration to what we’re afraid of. How have we justified that fear? I think we’d be better served by thinking and talking more openly about what makes us anxious, afraid, angry. These things aren’t easy or comfortable to think about, much less talk about. But considering the rate of gun violence, it strikes me that we’d best start thinking and talking about what’s bothering us to help ensure that we know what problem we’re trying to solve and are therefore in a better position to solve that problem.  

Again, the rate of mass shootings in the United States exceeds one a day. Four victims of gun violence each day means there are 1,460 victims every year. But that’s just from mass shooting events. Again, the definition of “mass shooting” is four or more people killed or injured in a single incident. As noted earlier, people are killed or injured every day guns during incidents that don’t qualify as mass shooting events.  

We should not be OK with that. I am not OK with that. I am not OK with the possibility that my wife, my children, my grandchildren – my grandchildren! – might today’s victims. Or tomorrow’s. I’m not OK with your family, or you, being potential victims either. We have to do more than change the channel the time next a mass shooting is appalling enough to make it onto the news. We need to do more than change the subject, or just ignore the carnage altogether because it’s difficult to stop it. We need to be realistic that solving this problem won’t be easy and it won’t happen quickly. But that’s not an excuse to avoid engaging the problem. Let’s reach inside our own mind and heart and find the courage to get started.

What we want from our audience

A number of years ago I was talking, or maybe emailing, with another photographer who said that he wanted to be able to make photographs that people would look at and say, “Oh my, that’s lovely!” It seems like a good mental exercise to consider who our audience is and to set some expectations or goals for ourselves about how we’d like our audience to react to our work. But having said that, I must confess that I don’t do it very much myself.

At some point, I declared (to myself) that I was an artist working in the medium of photography. Which means that I expect, or would at least like, my audience to consider that my pictures are art. But that has more to do with shedding some of my own old, threadbare, mental and emotional baggage than with an inflated sense of the quality of my work, of my skill, or of my importance as a photographer. Much less artist. My designation of myself as an artist has more to do with setting a standard for my own work, and even beyond than that, with aspiring to produce something of significance, something that matters to someone else. I’m pretty sure that I’ve failed completely so far.

To be clear, I’m not beating myself up by acknowledging that. Nor am I whining about it and thinking life is unfair to me. My goal was to set a standard for my own work that I’ll probably never attain. But I believe that I will end up doing better work over the long term for having tried to achieve the impossible dream than if the goal was merely to, I don’t know, adhere to the rule of thirds in all my pictures. But the more we strive to make something significant, the greater the chance that we’ll alienate someone in our audience. Not everyone will share our understanding of what a significant picture is. Or of how we make that picture, even if the audience agrees that the subject matter is significant. That potential – actually, the certainty – that we’ll put some members of our audience off, maybe annoy or even offend them, is a good thing. If the audience for artwork, including me, is never challenged to rethink an assumption we hold, or to open ourselves to a point of view we haven’t thought of, our life is poorer and less interesting than if we are.

So, the reaction I’d most like to invoke in someone looking at my pictures is first that the picture holds the viewer’s attention for say 10-12 seconds. More if possible, but 12 seconds is a heavy enough lift to start with. Yes, seconds. Like it or not, for a lot of artwork, and especially photography, the average viewer is unlikely to give our work, our precious work, our precious work that we’ve labored over and agonized over, anything more than a glance and a swipe or a page turn, or a step to the next thing on the gallery wall. Like or not, artwork in general, and photography more specifically, seldom holds the power it once had to transform anyone’s life.

Second, I’m not looking for an immediate positive reaction, as much as for the viewer to remain open to the possibility of the work. Several years ago, I bought some glass flowers at a local art museum. We have a curio cabinet in our home with a class top. I was hoping that if I put the flowers in a clear glass vase, the light from the cabinet would shine upward through the glass top, resulting in a glowing effect in the flowers. Nice idea but it didn’t work. The family didn’t really like the flowers and I returned them to the museum. But it was a few days before I could bring them back and over that time, my daughter said more than once that those flowers were growing on her. That’s a reaction that I’d love to have from people looking at my pictures.

A successful response to my work might be, “Huh.” Not bewilderment, but also not reaching a definite conclusion about the work either. Not outright rejection, but also not, “WOW, that really blows me away!!” And then have the piece work on the viewer’s consciousness over time. Or, probably more accurately, it would generate consideration of the work in the viewer’s subconscious, so that they keep looking at the picture and seeing new things, so that they see the picture in new ways the more they look at it. I have no formula for achieving that. I have no way to know, much less measure, whether it ever happens at all. But if I could choose a reaction to my work, I think that would be it.

Be well and thanks for reading!

Gesture as subject

A feature was added recently to the software that I use to edit my photographs that lets me select the main subject with a single mouse click. By selecting the subject, I can adjust the color, contrast, and sharpness of the subject without affecting anything else in the picture. You can also select the subject and then invert the selection, so that everything except the main subject is selected. That lets me, say, make the background darker to help the subject stand out without affecting the subject itself. But there’s a problem. In a lot of my photographs, the software says it can’t find any subject at all. : (

 That’s supposed to be bad. Because, well, it is bad. But then again, there are certainly pictures from real photographers that don’t have obvious subjects that the software would recognize. For example, in a photo of a field of wheat or corn or sunflowers, the subject could be the entire field of plants, not necessarily a single one. Still, it got me thinking about subject matter. As we develop our ability to compose pictures, photographers learn to distill the clutter and chaos of life into something that’s visually compelling. One red maple leaf that landed on a weathered wooden picnic table might be the picture instead the visual cacophony of leaves in various stages of decomposition and/or damage scattered all over the ground, or that will show up as cliched blobs of color on trees.

 Sometimes the main subject is the relationship of things in the picture. It can be between people, but also between objects, people and objects, people and animals, animals and objects, differing textures or colors or light and dark tones. You get the idea. Those relationships can be incredibly important to the photograph being successful. And sometimes the subject is the chaos of real life. When a picture doesn’t have a clear or obvious subject but still draws viewers in and holds their interest, the quality that makes that photograph successful is something called gesture.

 When I first heard the term, gesture, in relation to photography, the image that came into my mind was someone moving his or her hands as they spoke. But it’s more than that. Synonyms for gesture might be essence or characteristic. Gesture is the defining quality of any thing that makes it unique. And interesting. Or not. Because you can also have bad gesture in a photograph. Everything has gesture, says New York based photographer, Jay Maisel, you can’t take a picture without it. But it won’t always compliment the subject. Ideally a good photograph has interesting light, compelling colors (or tones if it’s a black and white photograph), and great gesture. Maisel says that you don’t always get all three. Sometimes you can only get one of those characteristics. If you can get good gesture but have to compromise on light or color, go for the gesture.

 For a long time, I’ve wondered what drew me to the subject matter that interests me. National parks are fine. I’m as moved by spectacular scenery as anyone else. If I can photograph them, I will, of course. Yet spectacular scenery is so obvious. What I most notice, what really gets my attention, is great gesture—and light if I can get it—in stuff that wouldn’t otherwise deserve a second glance.

 When I was a child, my mom and dad would sometimes entertain us on Sunday afternoons by packing us kids in the car and driving around the countryside of northern Illinois. I loved it. Our car didn’t have air conditioning. But then our house didn’t have air conditioning. So, the air moving through the open windows of the car provided a break from the sweltering heat and humidity of Midwest summers. Sometimes we visited my uncle and his family in southern Wisconsin. Sometimes we just drove around the rural land that still surrounded Chicago back then, rich farmland that wasn’t yet devoured by the soon-to-be-exploding suburbs. Someone else might have experienced this as an exercise in character development through soul-crushing boredom. But something in that landscape resonated with me, especially in the afternoons when the edge came off of the day’s heat and the light softened. And then somewhere around 1960, my dad bought a larger house in Chicago and moved his family, against the current of the great suburban migration, back to the city. The Sunday afternoon car rides stopped after that.

 I was young then, not yet six years old. Maybe reality differs somewhat from my memory of those times. Of course, it does, how could it not? But we did spend time in the car, watching rows of crops flowing over the gently rolling fields, watching as those graceful, languorous fields began to be engulfed by the suburbs that were starting to spread like an ink stain on a linen tablecloth. Even then, with no analysis to justify a reason for it, I liked the farm fields better than the housing additions. The comfort that I found in rural landscapes early in my life has remained with me to this day.

 In the early 2000s, I saw a photograph of a railroad crossing in open country that made me feel deeply nostalgic for those rides in the late 1950s. It was a simple picture and didn’t stay on that photographer’s website for long. I think the photographer caught the gesture of the light and land, and the interplay of engineered and organic forms that revealed itself in that picture. I think the quality or characteristic that I remembered from my childhood is gesture and it’s something that still resonates with me. To the extent that I’ve made successful pictures, that success is based on good gesture showing up in the pictures as much as any other subject matter or technical process.

Slower and Queiter

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

We’ve reached the end of April as I write these words. Four months into the year, a lot has happened. I started making a list of the significant national events that took place this year and promptly stopped. This is a blog about photography and maybe art, and I don’t need the aggravation that I’ll subject myself to if I start listing the election controversy, the attack on the United States capitol, and all the rest.

If you’re a caring person, and you make artwork that’s not documentary or intended to comment on social or political events, what do you do about what’s happening in the country? Does simple, seemingly inconsequential landscape photography matter? Is it even responsible?

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I’ve set out some prints that I can see from the desk where I’m writing. It helps to able to see them as I work, and to live with them over time. There’s an image of some reeds or grass in a lake that I photographed in March. The appeal of the scene lies in the light and shadow on this little patch of growth in a lake. Another photograph shows highlights glinting off of chunks of ice as the ice cover breaks up and the river reverts to its normal summer flow. A third image shows reeds sticking out of soft, weathered ice in a lake that’s losing its ice pack. The reeds or grass are silhouetted by the sunlight glaring off the surface of the ice. The images were all made at the “wrong” time of day. They’re not spectacular images in the sense that a lot of Western landscape photography is, images in the Grand Landscape tradition.

But after a year – really, after more than four years – of noise and conflict, and confrontation and bombast, these images appealed to me because they’re muted, well composed, I think. Decent pictures, but they don’t blow your socks off – by design. It was my deliberate intention to leave your socks in place.

Instead, let’s consider how else we might respond to a landscape, whether by looking at it, walking through it, or photographing it. To begin we might consider that at this point in human history we are in a way foreigners on our own home planet. A writer I admire once related a story about how people whose land was foreign to him reacted to him when he visited. This happened more than once, and in more than one place. People in these various places tended to ask three questions. While the exact form of the questions probably differed across continents and cultures, at heart, they asked the same things:

·        Who are you?

·        Where do you come from?

·        Why are you here?

It strikes me that given the tumult in our own nation, and within our own hearts, we don’t need more shouting, more shrillness, more unalterably convinced of the rightness of our own positions. Instead, it might be better to sit quietly and ask those questions of ourselves.

The way I answer them is that I’m an ordinary person who learns slowly but appreciates the stuff that’s around him. The “stuff that’s around” me is the landscape, urban, rural and wild, of the American Midwest. It’s where I grew up. It’s where I live. While there are other places in the world that I enjoy visiting when the opportunity arises, this (the Midwest) is the place I want to live. I’m here to look around and explore this region, to take care of things to the extent that I can, and to notice what’s beautiful here and try to help other people see it too.

If you live in Iceland or Yosemite National Park or Antarctica, you might have spectacular things to notice. What I’m trying to show in my photography is that there’s a lot of interesting, even extraordinary stuff to see, every day, even in nondescript places.

John Ruskin, a Victorian art critic, is reported to have said that ”…the more I think of it, the more I find this conclusion pressed upon me that the greatest thing a human soul does is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think. But thousands of people can think for one who can see.”

It’s an interesting quotation that I heard from the writer, speaker and teacher, David Brooks. But while I respect the idea, I begin to think that a task that’s more worth setting our attention to now is sitting quietly and accepting the roaring silence of our own soul. Many of us, maybe at this point, most of us, are deeply discomfited by the thought of doing that. If that describes your response to what I’m proposing, I commend some books by the psychologist, James Hollis, as a means of helping you become comfortable with your own discomfort, and perhaps with introducing the idea that if we can learn to spend some quiet time with ourselves, we might find greater capacity to live with each other. And we might even begin to accept the idea that others can live with us too. I believe it’s worth trying.

In the meantime, you could certainly do worse than looking, and seeing, and telling what you saw in a plain way.

Thanks for reading!

Now what?

Last Thursday I visited my dentist to make a plan for repairing some cracks in my teeth. I’ve found my jaw tightly clenched a number of times throughout the past year. During previous visits, I remember the dentist telling his assistant that he wanted to watch 31. Also 17. For years I didn’t understand what that meant. A couple years ago a different dentist, a younger man, explained that they wanted to watch a few teeth that were cracked. Last year, the number of cracked teeth went from two to five or six. Somewhere around that number. Not too long after that, a story in the New York Times reported that I’m not alone. While the story didn’t mention me by name, it brought out the fact that dentists have been seeing many, many more cracks in their patient’s teeth than they’ve ever seen before. It’s been a stressful year. People clench and grind their teeth in response, I guess.

This might sound melodramatic, but bear with me. In addition to our teeth, there are significant cracks in our society’s foundation. Last week a white police officer was convicted of three crimes for killing black man. Unless you just came out of a coma, you know about the verdict that resulted from the murder of George Floyd. The Minneapolis Chief of Police testified on behalf of the victim, and in opposition to his own officer’s behavior. But this is from the Minneapolis Police Department’s original statement about Mr. Floyd’s death:

Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction

…He (Mr. Floyd) was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers… Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later.

Except for a bystander’s video, that would have been story. The guy resisted. He had some medical problem. We tried to help him… I dunno; it didn’t work. Oh well. Shit happens. Guess he shouldn’t have resisted.

Most of us, well, some of us, want to believe that justice was finally served. I’m not sure it was. Mr. Floyd doesn’t get his life back, as commentators have noted. But all the momentum in the actions of the police sought to blame the man who was killed for his own death, and deny what really happened. If the denial didn’t stick in this one case, if the police officer who killed a black man wasn’t excused for it in this case, other officers have been excused in other cases that we know of. I find it physiologically upsetting to consider how many times a police department statement along the lines of what was released after George Floyd’s killing ended up as the final word on the matter.

I think most of us accept that the video and trial evidence was so stark, so incontrovertible that the killing couldn’t be excused this time. But will there be any accountability for the initial, official, lie about what had happened? Not that I know of. But until we can start to hold ourselves to a more honest reckoning of what we’re doing, how we’re living, it’s not accurate to speak of justice.

Barry Lopez, the author of Arctic Dreams, Of Wolves and Men, and other books and articles, said at a writer’s conference in 2006 that we live in a manner that can be termed insane. When the by-products of our manufacturing processes cause cancer, he said, we treat the cancer instead of reconsidering our manufacturing processes. When we’re so overstimulated by the pace of contemporary life and the continuous stream of communications that we can’t sleep, or sometimes even function, without the assistance of drugs, we take the drugs rather than turning down the stimulation. When our economic, political, religious, and social systems result in deep, wide-spread inequality, despair and shortening lifespans, we seek escapism, rather than question the beliefs and efficacy of those systems.

At least one previous blog post has summarized one theory of what western society is going through, which we’ve gone through at roughly five-hundred-year intervals for the past two, and maybe three thousand years. That argument suggests that we’re in the midst of a societal reset that seeks new and more effective answers to two and possibly three fundamental questions:

·        What constitutes a good life?

·        What can we look to as an authority, really as the authority?

What’s new in this iteration of this reset is the role of technology in our lives. That might add one more question to the mix, which is what does it mean to be human?

These are significant questions and while I can offer my own answers to at least one or two of them, I’ll close this post with a few more questions, again from Barry Lopez. Lopez said that in his encounters with indigenous people, in one form or another, three questions tended to be asked of him.

·        Who are you?

·        Where do you come from?

·        Why are you here?

As we consider what we hope for in life and what we fear, what our aspirations for our children are and how to relate to each other, a useful exercise might be to look inside ourselves to answer those three questions. Many of us feel that things aren’t going so well right now. That seems to be a near universal conclusion. We’re all over the place on what the causes and the solutions are, but there seems to be broad agreement that things aren’t what they should be. Thinking through who we are, where we’ve come from in a psychological and even spiritual sense, as well as geographical sense, and what we’re doing here, might show us a more constructive path forward than the one we’re on at the moment.

It might be best to take a breath, turn off the television and the smart phone, and give some quiet consideration to what we want for ourselves and to whether or not we’re acting in a constructive manner or not. It might not be pleasant, but it’s inner work that needs to be done.

Objectives and understanding

The other day I found some notes after sharing images with some other photographers. The responses varied from generally supportive to suggestions for significantly altering the image. The reactions to some images were all delivered respectfully and out of a genuine desire to be helpful. Some of the responses suggested that the reviewer’s goals for an image were different from mine. And that’s OK.

I’m not tying to create work that’s so original that no one enjoys it or understands it. At the same time, I’m not trying to re-create images that lots of people make. When I seek feedback about my images, I’m hoping for help finding some way between those approaches to image making.

An awful lot of landscape photography seems like it’s trying too hard to impress. In some ways that seems true of a number of areas of life, and I think our lives are diminished because of it, but that’s another conversation. The image at the top of this post is a screen capture of a web search of the term “landscape photography.” One one hand, the images range from well done to exceptionally well done. Yet I have misgivings about them and I’m not trying to make images like this. That might sound arrogant, or like I don’t want to make images that are well done, much less exceptionally well done, that isn’t the case.

It’s hard to articulate the misgivings I have. Sometimes it’s hard to define what my objectives are for my own images. To some extent, I know it when I see it. But from another point of view, we don’t always have the language to describe why something is art, or why it’s not. Maybe it’s already been said that if we can describe it clearly and unambiguously, it’s not art. I think it’s the case that if you deconstruct a living thing, maybe you can understand how it works, but you’ll probably break the thing. Is art a living thing? I don’t think of the art that I try to make as a biological thing, but I hope that my work allows for something like a dialog between myself and my audience. Or between my audience and the work. For people who have my images in their home, I hope that as they change, and as their perception of the world changes and grows, my work can somehow remain interesting and even supportive of their growth, in effect changing along with them.

I’m not sure that the most popular landscape work, work that you might agree is really impressive when you first see it, always has the capacity to maintain interest over time.

Another point thing that I think needs to be said is that there’s a different reaction to a rock and roll, or country, or blues song than there is to say, Mozart. Being able to appreciate all those genres is a good thing. It enriches our lives and each of them has their place. I think you’re poorer if you appreciate Mozart but can’t see the genius of Merle Haggard’s work. But neither do I mean to put them on equal footing. Many people struggle to explain why one is better. Not everyone understands why Bob Ross’s paintings aren’t the same level of accomplishment as Joseph Mallord William Turner. Mr. Ross is deceased, but for years he completed paintings in a half-hour show on Public Television in the United States. Mr. Turner, also known as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolorist. He is known for his expressive use color, for painting imaginative landscapes, and for his turbulent, often violent marine paintings.

Our education system seems to have stopped even trying to instill any sense of visual literacy in students. If that statement seems controversial, I don’t believe it’s provocative to note that we don’t value arts education at the same level as STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). And our lives are diminished by the lack the ability to differentiate art that’s good from art that’s not as good. And we’re in worse shape still as a society if we neither know nor care why that should matter.

To be clear, and at the risk of being repetitious, it’s great to support local artists who aren’t masters, who probably won’t ever be masters. I know fine artists who pour their heart into their work, but who are unlikely to be offered a solo exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. I’m also aware of artists who are one or more steps up on the scale of quality, originality, and prestige, but who probably won’t be considered among the elite, ground-breaking artists of their generation.

Well, I’ve been going on for a while now and it’d probably be good to bring this to some sort of conclusion. As I work through my thought process, there are two points that arise from all the preceding words.

One point is that while we should be able to differentiate good and bad art, it’s also appropriate to appreciate less-than-elite artists. The thirteen-year-old who just made his middle-school’s junior varsity basketball team won’t be as entertaining to watch as Lebron James. Unless you’re the player’s parent or sibling. There’s technology available to give us unprecedented opportunities to see, and at some level, experience, some of our species greatest achievements. That’s great, but if we dismiss everyone who’s not the very best, we do a disservice to everyone who’s doing their best to contribute their unique creative energy and output to the overall pile of human endeavor. I hope we all appreciate our local artists. And give them some financial support too. And I hope that we work to cultivate our own tastes so that we can also see the best work our species has produced and understand why it’s the best.

The second point is that I need to set a personal goal to recognize what’s popular in the area of art that I’m working in, and further, to understand how that influences reactions to my work. In thinking about the notes that started this essay, I have to say that I got some really good guidance. Yet, as good as some of the suggestions were, it was guiding me toward images that I was not – and am not – trying to make. Some of the most valuable learning is the insight into why someone has said what they said about our work. And even greater value beyond that comes from understanding where the reactions might – and where they might not – help you take your work where you want it to go.

Three Months In

I have a day job. If you’ve looked at the images on this site or read the posts in the site’s blog section, that statement probably seems obvious. Who would pay for this?!

In my defense, I’m not trying to get a gillion followers nor am I angling for some sense of celebrity. As far as I can tell, I’ve done nothing to promote this site or the associated blog. And while I haven’t really checked – and have no immediate plans to check –the result of my efforts to promote the site have yielded exactly what I’d have expected: I don’t know that are really any visitors. Which is completely OK.

I have two goals. For images, I’m trying to learn to see without a camera, to become more visually present, to practice pulling my mind out of its routine obsessions and fixations so that I can see the tiny, seemingly insignificant wonders of light and form and texture that abound. Every day. In every place I’ve ever been. And on the occasions when I am in front of a more dramatic scene, then I’m practicing to capture the scale and drama, and mystery of those places too. The blog entries have been an exercise in discipline, gently forcing me to become aware of what I think, and to make a practice of writing some of it down so I can actually see what I think. Like a photograph that visually freezes a moment of time, the blog posts do the same thing in a cognitive sense. They capture something of what I was thinking about at a moment in time.

Anil Dash, the CEO of a developer community and long-time blogger, said in an interview that it takes 10 years to get good at blogging. I’m about three months in. Only nine years and nine months to go before these posts might not suck so much. : ) (My sense of self-deprecating humor tends toward statements like that.)

When I was in my teens, I fell in love with photography as an art form. I wasn’t able to practice it seriously myself until the mid-2000s, I’m about 15-17 years into trying to make art. I have no idea how long it takes to get good at this.

I do like most of the images on this site at least a little bit or I wouldn’t have posted them. It’s also the case that with most of them that they don’t quite measure up to what I’d hoped for. Again, I’m OK with that. I’m not going to be Edward Weston or Annie Leibowitz. Someone said we have to be content to be ourselves; everyone else is already taken. I disagree slightly. You obviously can’t take up someone else’s existence, but the “be content” with that part bothers me. Most of us aren’t so good – at anything; not necessarily photography – that we should be content with who we are. It’s better to accept who and what we are at the moment, but then work to make ourselves a little better. I’m not optimistic about my chances for success. After all, if I’m the main resource that I have to work with, it strikes me that I’m already set up to fail. So, the key is to try not take ourselves too seriously, which I’m trying to do – or trying not to do?? – in this post. But also, to keep trying (to be better) while acknowledging that our efforts are liable to be halting, fallible, sometimes misguided, with progress coming slowly, if at all.

As I approached this week’s post I wondered whether I’ve just been embarrassing myself with this entire site, and if it wouldn’t be better to just stop. That’d sure be easier. Then again, if no one is paying any attention, what difference does it make? As I finish three month’s worth of weekly posts, I honestly don’t know if I’ll make it through four months of posting something every week. But obviously I posted something this week. And do I plan to try to post again next week.

If anyone is looking or reading, thank you kindly for your time. Feel free to comment, if you’d like to. I appreciate it even if I don’t know you’re there. Don’t try to make sense of that sentence. It’s kind of a mystery, I guess. Have a great day!

Art That Isn’t (except when it is)

My employer maintains a significant art collection. In keeping with that, there’s also a group that conducts tours of the artwork and works to promote a relationship between my employer and the local arts community. I’m a member of that group. Someone posed a question to us once about some marketing posters that are framed in glass in a hallway where I work. While I don’t remember the exact question, the gist of it was about the relationship between art embodied in those posters and the other artwork that’s displayed on our campus. The person asking the question referred to the posters as “art.” None of the other group members responded, so eventually I did. I also remember my initial internal reaction was that those posters weren’t art. Not properly speaking.

I was wrong.

All of us put a lot of ourselves into our work. That is undoubtedly the case if you’re fortunate enough to do the kind of work that nourishes you, where your work lets you devote the most focused and productive time in your days to doing what makes you feel most alive. Work is where we have the most resources, the most support from our social system. And most of the people I’ve worked with do indeed strive to do good work, to provide fair, if not exceptional, value for their compensation, to spend their time and energy on something that their colleagues, their families and they themselves can be proud of. But most of the work that pays the bills tends not to be what we typically think of as art. But approaching any kind of work in that way can be an artful way to approach your life. Think of the work of a skilled physician, a devoted teacher, or a good parent for three examples.

Of course, not everyone has a job that lets them do that kind of work. And even when some of us do have jobs that might allow that, that work doesn’t  necessarily resonate with us. For better or worse, it’s just not our work.

But if you put everything you have into what you do, why can’t it be art? And good advertising takes an idea and distills it into a cultural sensibility, into a message, that resonates and sticks with people. Well, when everything works right it can do that. Obviously, I’m stretching this idea to an unreasonable degree. Except that messages that capture the moment and stick in the understanding of a community have been made lots of times. Think of the Marlboro man when tobacco companies advertised on television. Arby’s has the meats. Some pharmaceutical company has a drug that gives you the healing and thereby the confidence, to “show more of you.” I’m old enough to remember lots of slogans from 30 years ago and don’t watch much television now. So my examples aren’t all as contemporary as they might be. But you get the idea.

I don’t know if the marketing posters were supposed to be art when they were mounted on the wall on our campus, but I know I was wrong to dismiss them. (Fortunately I didn’t dismiss them in my response to the person who asked about them.) And I’m glad that someone asked about them, which made me think about them, about the skilled people who worked hard to make them, and about how those considerations opened my own eyes just a bit.

Strengths and weaknesses

On occasion we come across the right person in the right moment who can crystalize and idea that we need to hear, at the time we need to hear it. In my experience, when that happens the idea stays with you.

One of those ideas came to me in my 20s and I’ve never forgotten it. “It doesn’t take a genius to do this job, it takes a certain mentality,” said a man named Marion. I’ve forgotten his last name. I believe he’d won election to the school board in his town. I’m not a lawyer, an engineer, or a physician, so I can’t speak to those jobs, but what Marion said has held true in various jobs that I have held: a model maker, a reporter, a technical writer, a technical editor, a manager of writers, editors, and their projects, and as something called a content strategist.

Another concept like that came decades later in a management training class sponsored by my employer. I think it was toward the end of the class and I don’t remember what triggered this response by the instructor, but what he said in response to the question or comment was, “Sometimes our greatest weakness is our greatest strength used to excess.”

It didn’t draw much reaction from the other managers in the class, nor did I react to it either. I’m not sure if the statement is a widely held idea, but I hadn’t heard it before. Maybe it’s an insight that everyone was taking in, as I was. Or maybe no one reacted to it because everyone (except me) knew it already and the instructor had only stated the obvious. Maybe the idea holds in landscape photography – or any kind of photography, for that matter – when we approach the same subject matter in more or less the same way. A flower isn’t a mountain, which isn’t a waterfall, which isn’t a forest. But if we’re capturing light that evokes a certain mood or response in our viewers, so that the subject ends up being more similar than it seems at first glance.

The photographer, teacher, and magazine editor, Minor White, told photographers to photograph what it is, but then photograph what else it is. It’s that what else it is that might become formulaic if we’re not attentive to it. If we start finding a recipe that produces what we feel are successful images, where we know what works and what doesn’t, and we’re able to eliminate bad photographs by not making them, then what we gain in avoiding mistakes might be offset by what we lose in exploring new approaches to our subject matter. I say we, but I’m really talking about my own pictures.

Aside from not being creative enough, or innovative enough, an issue might be that I do something along the lines of what someone called “majoring in the minors.” The concept is that we get good at trivial things and then miss something more significant, a way of approaching the subject that suggests a more nuanced and thoughtful approach to what seems like even mundane subjects. It’s not clear to me how one does that, other than by trying to get it right. Over and over again. It’s kind of like trying to write a blog post each week. I hope that the discipline of doing it consistently eventually results in um… a better result.

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

What makes soil fertile – part 3 of 3

The last few weeks I’ve been writing about characteristics or traits that might help nurture our work. Obviously in a blog that’s part of a photography web site, the word work in the previous sentence refers to photography or artwork. But being successful in any area requires pursuing the work from a certain outlook that provides a foundation. As with a physical building, if the foundation is good, the structure is more likely to stand. I came up with five traits that can help foster a mental and emotional space that’s conducive to doing good work, like soil that nurtures plants in a garden. The traits are: persistence, discernment, openness, capacity, and connection.

This post talks about the last trait, connection. The last post ended in the recognition of the need to find subject matter that inspires us. I said that finding a connection to something that gives us meaning can help us persevere through the inevitable difficulties that arise as we develop our own capacity. I said that going through that process was a reliable pathway to excellence, even if it’s frustrating at times.

The need to find something worthwhile brings me to the concept of connecting with our subject matter. As I write this, I’m living in the northern Great Plains. This land was once the bed of a glacial lake and is remarkably flat and treeless. Located near the center of the North American continent, it’s a place that gets hot in summer, cold in winter and is often relentlessly windy. Many people consider it boring and refer to it as “flyover country.” But I feel connected to this place, and the people who live here. Seeming to lack the dramatic features of mountains or seacoasts, I’ve said that this isn’t a place that knocks you over the head. Instead, it gets under your skin. Whether my photography moves other people or not, this landscape does move me. I need to photograph here.

Another landscape photographer, Chuck Kimmerle, also found a connection to this landscape. Chuck has a significant body of work from the northern plains. Then again, Jay Maisel found a connection with his home, New York City, and Ansel Adams had it in the Yosemite Valley. Eugene Atget found it in Paris. Pete Souza found with the presidents that he photographed. Nick Brandt and David Yarrow are two photographers who found this connection in the animals they’ve photographed on the African continent, as Christian Vizl found a connection to life in the sea. I could go on and on. But others might argue that it’s not necessary to photograph the same subject matter repeatedly and that traveling to new locations and seeing new people and new things keeps their imagery fresh and alive. I can’t argue with that point, but I’ll suggest that maybe people who think that way find connection through the process of becoming connected, as they experience new places and form new relationships, either with people or with cities or landscapes that are new to them.

To be honest, I don’t like saying, ‘Oh, there’s no wrong answer here.’ I don’t know that; maybe there is a wrong answer. But there’s probably also more than one right answer. So, whether we’re energized by new places and people and flight from our personal comfort zone, or whether we find that some subject matter renews itself in our perception as we explore it and work with it over time, the quality and depth of our relationship to our subject matter will have a material impact on the quality of our work.

The mentor that I chose to exemplify this trait is Craig Blacklock, whose work shows a deep connection to Lake Superior and the rivers and forests in that region in the northern United States. Craig has completed a number of projects over the course of his career, including photographing the shoreline all the way around the largest of the Great Lakes. Another project focused on the north shore of the lake in Minnesota. Another one was a study of horizon lines, looking across the lake from a variety of elevated vantage points, and another project was a series of figure studies with his model posed at various locations – and in each of the four seasons – on the shore of Lake Superior.

Craig Blacklock found one audience for his work in the tourists who visit Lake Superior’s north shore and purchase prints and Craig’s books as mementoes of their vacations. Resorts and houses are strung along the shoreline from Duluth, Minnesota, to Grand Portage National Monument near the border of the United States and Canada. In one of his books, he asks his audience if they love the lake enough to save it, to save its shorelines and ecosystems, and the rivers and forests that feed clean water into the it. Can they love the lake enough to hold off building a vacation home on the shore to let that shore retain something of its original character? Exploring questions about real estate development is a task for another place and time, but I’m mentioning it here because when we connect to something, when we give something of ourselves to a person or place, we make ourselves vulnerable to how that person or place changes, as they inevitably will. In the 20 years that I’ve visited Lake Superior’s north shore, I’ve been dismayed by the development that’s taken place. And yet, I need a place to stay during my visits, as does everyone else who visits. People who grew up there need a way to make a living. So I go there and purchase goods and services as part of experiencing the purity and majesty of the great lake and am grateful for the hotels on the shore.

Closer to my home in North Dakota, I also see changes. More and more, land that I’d like to photograph is posted with no trespassing signs. And while I love and admire the people who live here, the political stridency that besets the nation is present here, as well. And it is troubling to me. Yet the connection that I have still holds. There is no growth without cost. What we get out of our work and our lives is proportional to what we put in. When we connect to a place that we love that place will change and the change can be painful. If nothing else, opportunity cost kicks it. When we commit to pursing one path, we forego the chance to pursue other paths. But foregoing the connection leaves us poorer in spirit and our work diminished. So we find what fires our passion, follow where it leads and take the gifts and the grief that goes with it.

But if I present connection as a negative thing, that’s not my intent. I simply want to be honest about it. If you commit to working in a certain area, to connecting with specific subject matter or photographing in a certain place and you never experience any sense of disappointment or loss, maybe you’re not as connected to it as you thought. But if some sense of poignance is part of your experience, it has been my experience that the rewards of getting to know your subject deeply are worth the discomfort that arises along the way. As in life, the discomfort is a way of checking that you really are engaged with it. And that’s a good thing.

What makes soil fertile – part 2 of 3

Last week, I posted some thoughts about characteristics or traits that might help provide a foundation from which to do our work. Obviously in a blog that’s part of a photography web site, the word work in the previous sentence refers to photography or artwork. But being successful in any endeavor requires pursuing the work from a certain outlook that gives you a foundation. As with a physical building, if the foundation is good, the structure is more likely to stand. Ask 10 people about this and you’ll likely end up with 10 sets of traits, all of which sound right. I settled on five: persistence, discernment, openness, capacity and connection.

This post talks about the fourth trait, capacity. My structure for these posts is that they can’t exceed two pages in a Word document, which is where I write the drafts. So I’ll post one more entry after this one, for the final trait, connection, in what’s now become a series.

Persistence, discernment, and openness, the first three traits, seemed pretty straightforward as I wrote about them. The two traits that are left, capacity and connection, seem more ambiguous, or multi-faceted. When I first thought about capacity, for example, I meant capacity for work. But thinking more led to the realization that capacity could also refer to expanding our capacity to understand our work, to understand other artwork, to understand the things that are happening in society that we might be reacting to in our artwork, to understand our subject matter, and to expand our understanding human behavior and even life itself. Work, or the capacity for expending effort, is a highly valued in our society at the moment. Too much so in my opinion. To be successful, we obviously have to stay with the work once we start it, and especially after we confront the inevitable obstacles and challenges on the way to completing it. But it’s also the case that keeping yourself super-busy with tasks that don’t move you closer to a meaningful goal does not constitute hard work in any meaningful sense.

If capacity refers the amount of work you can do, it also refers to our ability to take in work that can inspire or teach us. Devotion could be another way of thinking about it. The PBS interviewer, Charlie Rose, asked the iconic photographer, Richard Avedon, a question about what made him, or photographers who were his peers – which would include people like Irving Penn and Arnold Newman – special. While I don’t remember the exact words now, I believe that captures the spirit of his question. And what I took from Avedon’s answer is that photographers or other artists at the highest level are all obsessed with the work. “Obsessed” is my word; I don’t clearly remember Avedon using it, but again, I don’t think it misstates the point he was making. The greatest practitioners in any field do seem to be obsessed with quality and innovative approaches to any given assignment, but at the end of the day, I think what distinguishes the best people in any field is that they love the work more than most of the others who are doing it.

If you love the work, all the practice and repetition and learning that are necessary to being good at the work isn’t drudgery. There’s joy in putting in effort against those challenges. In their book, Art and Fear, Ted Orland and David Bayles write that the primary job of an artist is to do their work. The writer, Steven Pressfield, makes a similar case in his book, The War of Art. Pressfield uses the term “resistance” to define the overarching, viscous goop of entropy and excuse that keeps us from pursuing whatever it is that we think we want to do. Resistance is the thing you have to overcome so that you can just get down to doing the work. Anne Lamott, another writer, says it more simply. You have to keep your butt in the chair and accept the fact that first drafts invariably suck.

At its most useful, work is a process of transformation. Producing work that doesn’t live up to our plan for it, forces us to confront our limits. By going through repeated attempts to get the work right, we get to push against those limits until we’ve redefined them. Doing the work is the process of transforming ourselves from who we are now, from having whatever skills we have at the moment, to someone with more expansive skills who can produce better results over more varied circumstances by the time we’re finished.

The concept of capacity also involves being open to other people’s work, other photographic genres, as well as painting and drawing, and other modes of artistic expression. You don’t have shoot portraits and landscapes and architecture and… But I believe it helps our growth if we’ve seen and recognized good work in different genres. I believe, at least I hope, that we learn from simply enjoying great work, even if most of that learning is subconscious.

Brooks Jensen is the mentor-person for this trait. Brooks is the editor of Lenswork magazine, has posted over a thousand podcasts, has written multiple books, and has curated a series of photo anthologies from submissions by Lenswork readers. His subscription web site, Lenswork Online, contains an enormous amount of content, including his podcasts, other video and audios of interviews with photographers, and much more. In addition to all that, I believe he is a master photographer in his own right. Somewhere in all that content, Brooks talked about what it means to work hard, recalling years in which he mixed all of his own darkroom chemicals and did lots of other tedious tasks in the interest of working hard. At some point, he realized that was expending effort, but not necessarily doing stuff that would make him a better photographer. Eventually, he understood that working hard meant the following: Trying. And failing. And then learning from the experience and trying again.

Expending a lot of energy doesn’t necessarily make you better at whatever you’re trying to be good at. Working three jobs and not getting enough sleep and always being really busy aren’t necessarily worthwhile ways to live. Much less lead to success in something as demanding as making artwork. While I might be repeating myself, lots of activity isn’t worth that much, even though lots of activity is valued highly right now. Instead, it’s better to put that effort into finding your work. Finding something that’s meaningful to you and pursing that through failure, misguided effort, poor results, discouragement, and eventual, slow, painstaking improvement is a more reliable pathway to excellence. Unfortunately, it’s not necessarily quick. And a number of aspects of that process aren’t especially pleasant. But it’s the most reliable path to success in art or any other field that I’ve come across.

The need to find something worthwhile to work on brings me to the concept of connecting with our subject matter. And I’ll take up the discussion of that in the last post on this topic.

What Makes Soil Fertile – part 1 of 3

We want our work – really, at the end of the day, we want our lives – to pay off, to be worth something, to mean something to someone else. “How do you get good” is a question that comes up when considering any difficult activity. Someone is always ready to provide an answer and I came across another one this past week. It was by Daniel Milner, a photographer and You Tuber, who talked about 11 words that represent [good] photographers.

Brooks Jensen, the editor of Lenswork magazine among lots of other things, has written a series of articles about photographers, and some other artists, who inspire him. He groups them as the explorers, the visionaries, the producers and the storytellers. It’s an interesting list and his approach might be interesting to follow if you were doing a new version of a history of photography.

And there are many books, articles, videos on the qualities of mind and character that contribute to good work, whether it’s photography or anything else.

Dan Milner talked about words like intelligence, compassion, patience, tenacity, and seven others that I won’t make you read here. It’s a great list. I’d like to know more about the photographers Dan cites as examples. I’m not doing quite the same thing here. First, my list is shorter and my focus is less on the photographers than on the traits or characteristics of temperament. To the extent that we cultivate these things, I think they benefit our work, and ultimately our life. But even talking only about five of them gets long, so I’m splitting this into two posts so it doesn’t get too much longer than too long. I’ll also suggest a photographer who I think embodies each of the traits, but all the photographers that I name have all the traits. One trouble with lists is that they end up being exclusionary. If a word like, integrity, isn’t on the list, does that mean it doesn’t matter? Clearly no; integrity absolutely matters. But my goal is to run a manageable thought experiment, which requires some limits.

The five traits I’m talking about here is:

·        Persistence

·        Discernment

·        Openness

·        Capacity

·        Connection

Persistence probably seems obvious enough that it doesn’t require any elaboration. Somewhere I read this: The gods don’t speak to us when we’re not in a position to listen. Which is to say that if you want inspiration, you have to keep striving. Here’s another quotation that says what I want to say better than I can say it. The quote is from Annie Dillard, and she’s talking about writing. But the concept applies to anything difficult and worth striving for. When you finally get whatever it is, you’re striving for, “the sensation… is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only after you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then – and only then – it is handed to you.” That’s been my experience in a number of things in life, although it doesn’t feel like any kind of photographic accomplishment has been handed to me yet.

Jay Maisel is someone who personifies persistence. Although his mobility has been hampered lately by health issues, during his active shooting life, he carried his camera everywhere he went. He had a long, outstanding commercial career, but also photographed a phenomenal body of personal work. In the film, Jay Myself, that documented his move out of the commercial building he’d turned into a home for 50 years, he said that he overshot everything because he wasn’t good at exposure. So, he bracketed all his shots like crazy. He was also curious and playful. But in the end, his mantra seems to be, “carry the damn camera.”

Discernment doesn’t seem like a word that comes up that much in photography. Obviously, we have to edit the photographs that we make, and as we grow and mature in the craft, we learn what will ruin an image, and train ourselves not to photograph those scenes in the first place. Well, we refrain some of the time, at least. But that description puts discernment in negative terms. As we learn to see beyond the obvious subject matter, there’s a process of discernment that’s also happening. We learn what can make an image work, even if it’s not apparent to all viewers in the first half-second of their first glance at it. And saying that also implies that discernment is useful for our viewers to have. Images that don’t “blow us away” at first glance might be worth a second, longer, look. And if necessary, a third. It’s OK to let something grow on us, or to let ourselves grow into an image.

Chuck Kimmerle worked for years in the northern Great Plains in North Dakota, and then in Wyoming. In his monograph, Peripheral Vision, he writes that he was so astonished by the openness of Eastern North Dakota that he didn’t even attempt to photograph in his first five years there. Chuck’s photographs show that that taking time to absorb and understand your subject’s nuances can benefit the work. He brings a singular sensitivity and respect for this landscape in his images that shines through in the final result.

Openness is a trait that as I write the word, I ask myself why I need to say anything about it. Isn’t it obvious that openness is a trait that we need for success in life, much less in a creative endeavor like artmaking? But in the United States we’ve somehow separated ourselves into sects that are not open to understanding each other, much less respecting or learning from, the other. The theologian, historian and pastor, Martin Marty, notes that you can describe the whole of western civilization in three sentences: I believe in order that I might understand; I think, therefore I am; and I respond, even though I will be changed. That last sentence is the one that’s at risk today. Too many of us are too convinced of our own position to ever change our point of view. Or we’re frightened of what accepting a new idea might mean to the beliefs that give our lives purpose and dignity. But neither statement is a good recipe for growth.

The photographers – Jay Maisel, Charles Cramer, Vincent Versace to name three – speak of the necessity of being open to what resonates with them when they’re photographing. Vincent Versace says something close to this: We do not take photos, we are taken by photos. But to me, Robert Adams is the is the mentor photographer for this category. Adams has been open to beauty in landscapes that many photographers wouldn’t noticed as they rush to their next trophy destination. And some of the land he’s photographed has undergone profound damage. Being open to what’s before us today can make us uncomfortable. But I’m not sure you can make meaningful work if you can’t, or won’t, open yourself to what’s in front of you, no matter how painful it might be. When we do encounter something difficult, we have to find a way to take it into ourselves and our work. You can’t transform others or make transformational work if you’re not willing to be transformed yourself.

I’m going to stop here for this week. You’ll have to wait until next week for the last two characteristics. Thanks for reading. Have a good week!

Our Collective To-do List

My intention is that most of these posts are related to photography or making or consuming artwork. Today (I wrote the first draft of this on Saturday, February, 13) I’m writing about something else.

The United States Senate just acquitted the 45th President in the fourth impeachment trial in the country’s history. The President was impeached for encouraging his supports to go to the United States Capitol on January 6th of this year, while the House of Representatives and the Senate were certifying the results of the 2020 Presidential election. The acquittal wasn’t unexpected, but it remains disappointing. A few things come to mind as I try to avoid thinking about what just did, and didn’t, happen.

·        Impeachment as a mechanism for addressing the misconduct of presidents seems ineffective and broken. It’s a political mechanism, not a legal one, which appears to mean that the only thing that matters is which party has more votes. It doesn’t seem to matter what the president did; members of his own party won’t hold him – or presumably her – accountable, no matter what.

·        I’ve heard people say they dislike politics, but it strikes me that we haven’t practiced politics at the national level for at least 25 years, and maybe closer to 35, say during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Politics has been described as the art of the possible, which is a way of saying politics is how you get something done. Politics is an honorable, useful, necessary means for people with differing views to accomplish something worthwhile.

·        Practicing politics successfully requires enough humility to realize that you don’t have all the answers. It also requires that you care enough about getting something worthwhile done that you’ll work with someone who’s view differs from your own, so that they too can accomplish some of what they believe is the right thing to do. It requires enough wisdom to realize that a point of view that differs from your also has merit.

·        At the moment we have too many people who act as though a commitment to a value or moral position conveys the freedom to act with arrogant inflexibility. They don’t believe that they’re capable of being wrong and have no interest in anything other than retaining power. No matter what.

·        A lot of things are changing in our society and have been for some time. People say change is hard. The concept of disruption, of breaking something and replacing it with something new, is a big thing among some people who have profited outrageously from change that has upended other people’s lives. So, saying that change is hard ridiculous. Too many people have seen too much of what they’ve defined as valuable, noble, and moral taken away. And what’s replacing the traditional values that they’ve held fills them with dread and dismay.

Many things can be said of the events of the last four months, the last four years, and of the previous 40 years or more. Many of them are true. But maybe it would serve us better to take several steps back and look for some perspective.

The changes that we’re going through now involve more than buying stuff off the internet or keeping in touch with “our people” through social media, or using more products that were made in a different country. One observation that I’ve heard that makes sense to me – and that I’ve written about before – is that we’re somewhere in the process of a societal reset. The argument is that this has happened at roughly 500-year intervals in the past. So that last time was during the 1500s, the time of the protestant reformation, which included the rise of a bourgeoisie, the establishment of a middle class, the emergence of nation states, and the realization of a greater sense of ourselves as individuals. And then there was the protestant thing, too. The point is that at times like this, we reevaluate ourselves and our relationships with each other in the service of answering two key questions: what do we take as authority and what does it mean to live a good life.  

It shouldn’t be provocative to say that traditional sources of authority have shown themselves to be lacking. Over and over, those in positions of authority have failed to rise to the moment. The acquittal of a president who wasn’t mature enough to accept his own electoral defeat, and then encouraged a mob to riot to interrupt the final certification of the results, is just the latest example of the unambiguous failure of authority.

Meanwhile, the narrative we tell ourselves that hard work will eventually improve our physical circumstances hasn’t been true for years, if it ever was. Most adults work hard, or at least want to contribute to their family and community. But the median income for Americans is $50,000 a year, which puts you in a very precarious position financially.

Moreover, we seem to live through some form of mass media or social media as much as through in-person relationships. Work seems to consume us to the point that some of us experience work as the most vital part of our existence. But while contributing to something outside ourselves can give us a sense of value beyond money, work can also be as much a means of escape from what troubles us as the entertainment that fills our time and attention when we’re not working.

Even what we think of as the most vital components of our existence, religious faith, membership in a community, appreciation of art or music, can be a form of escape as much as a means of transcendence. The point is that many of us have realized that toiling endlessly for the necessities of our existence and avoiding confrontation with the unlikelihood that our circumstances will change very much doesn’t make for a very good life.

I don’t have a good ending to this post. I believe there is a better outcome ahead, but I don’t know how long it will take to reach it. I believe that we need to recognize our own ability to bear suffering, our willingness to help others who suffer, and the dark capacity within each of us to inflict suffering on others. We need to keep reaching for the light, and we need to do so most urgently during the times when the light seems farthest from reach. And maybe most of all, we need to realize that our greatest weakness is often our greatest virtue – when used to excess.

Love, kindness and respect will get us where we want to go more quickly and more surely than anger, violence, or retributive justice. I believe that it will take all our strength and resolve to remember and act on that. But I also to have to believe that we have it within us to heal, to answer the great questions before us in a way that lets us realize life that can be more fulfilling than what we’re struggling with now.

Entering Into What’s There

I heard a statement from Eugene Peterson, a former pastor from Montana who was talking about metaphor. While I don’t have the exact words, Mr. Peterson said something to the effect that an effective metaphor is true both in what it says and in what it doesn't say. He goes on to say, “We're not trying to figure it out; we're trying to enter what's there.”  

I think that something similar happens in the best photography. During the first half of the 20th Century, Ansel Adams, Edward Westin, Tina Modotti, and others photographed where people often struggled with, or even against, the land and the weather. But images from many of these photographers represented the natural landscape as beautiful and unspoiled. The land could be rugged, the weather dramatic and maybe threatening. But these photographers also combined these elements to form pictures that were beautiful and mysterious. The pristine landscape, seemingly untouched by human activity, or that was at least touched gently and benignly, wasn’t an enemy to be subdued and conquered. It was something to be seen, appreciated, revered.

By the 1970s, another group of photographers, maybe a new generation in a manner of speaking, also showed beauty in the landscape. But these photographers did so in a different way. Photographers working in this approach included Robert Adams, John Gossage, Faye Godwin, and of course, others. They depicted land that showed all manner of human intervention. The land they photographed retained beauty, but the photographers included the damage that had been done – and that continues to be done – to the land. The landscape wasn't the enemy anymore, but neither was it valued as something worthy of care. The land and whatever was in it was only there to be exploited. Land and the ecosystems it supports have been an object of abuse for a significant part of human history, but by the middle of the 20th Century, human capacity for altering and severely damaging a landscape had achieved – not a great use of that word – a scale that was undeniable. Yet those photographers still saw and captured beauty and mystery in the land in images that I find it difficult to turn away from.

By the 1980s and beyond, another approach was emerging. It began with some photographers from the earlier period, such as Ansel Adams and those he worked with, including John Sexton and Bruce Barnbaum, and of course lots of others. These people, mostly men, I guess, had mastered what was at the time the difficult process of producing photographic images. So, the veterans shared their knowledge in workshops that involved making photographs, offering critiques of students’ work, and instructing students in the techniques that the experts used to produce their own images. I couldn’t participate in those early workshops, but the workshop tradition continues and has evolved with the emergence of digital photography.

Workshops in my perception began to change from opportunities to learn to opportunities to make photographs in exotic locations. In the first decades of the 21st Century, travel to most any place on earth became feasible – if you had the money. And enough people had enough money to buy tens of thousands of dollars of camera gear, and the time and money to travel widely. So, workshops provided the means to go to remarkable places safely and efficiently. Participants were all but guaranteed coming away with spectacular photographs, if for no other reason than that the places they photographed were so spectacular.

I need to break for a second to make the point that I don’t mean this critically. At least I’m not going through all this because I think someone is doing something wrong. I am trying to understand how the practice of photography has changed through its history so that I can understand where opportunity lies in the art form today. What I’m concluding for myself is that the exotic place, the place that holds the most opportunity for making art that might hold any value over time, doesn’t involve a 20-hour flight. More likely, it requires a 20-minute walk out your own front door.

That’s neither easy to take in nor comfortable to accept. I’m finding it really hard to make an image that might qualify as art in the suburban dystopian environment where I live.

But considering the ongoing racial strife, political polarization, the continual degradation of the environment, and the insidious perpetuation of all this that social media was designed to effect, we need to start artmaking at home. Maybe our most effective work as artists is to help our audience, our fellow humans, enter into what’s taking place in our communities, on our home ground, and in our lives. I don’t mean to suggest that every photograph needs to show something controversial or dramatic, or that is has to make a paradigm-shifting statement. In fact, I’m advocating for the opposite. The more we identify an issue in our work, the more quickly viewers take sides; and the more quickly everyone’s position becomes set, at which point no one ever budges.

Again, to clarify, I’m not using the word “forgive” in the previous paragraph to mean letting something terrible go by without responding to it. Rather, it’s necessary to get to a point where the act doesn’t continue to hurt us and haunt us. It’s better to understand the harmful event and find some element of compassion, and yes, mercy, for the perpetrator so that we can all heal and move on from it.

That’s a lot to ask of a landscape picture. But maybe the picture can give us smaller glimpses into what’s happening around us. And from there, maybe we can find within ourselves a slightly expanded capacity to appreciate and delight in the small, everyday epiphanies that are constantly placed before us. And then from there, we can reconsider who we want to be, and how we want to be with each other. The opportunity to do that makes the cost of entering into what’s there – even when it feels scary and dangerous – worthwhile.

Shooting Toward Silence

Soft Path, 2020

People who make art have myriad goals for their work. If there’s an overriding one, it’s probably that the work achieves a high degree of excellence for whatever medium the artist is working in, and that it resonates with an audience. Wait, that’s two goals. I’ll stand by the assertion that artists want to produce high-quality work. And when they do, it’s reasonable to want to recognition for it.

At the most basic level, quality in a photograph means getting the focus and the exposure right and avoiding composition errors that ruin the picture. More advanced photographers also hold less specific and more atmospheric aims. For example, British landscape photographer David Ward talks about the qualities of simplicity, mystery, and beauty as being characteristics of his most successful photographs. He elaborates on each of these in his book, Landscape Beyond.

American photographer, Jay Maisel, talks about incorporating light, gesture, and color in his photographs. Jay’s book of that title, Light, Gesture and Color, includes images that show examples of all of these and he shares some thoughts about each of them in the book’s introduction.

Other photographers have their own goals for their photographs. Some photographers, or even artists working in other media might share some of the characteristics that Jay Maisel and David Ward describe. But the way Jay and David describe some of the qualities that might contribute to a photograph being art are among the clearest and most accessible that I’ve come across. But here’s why I’m writing about it at all.

Recently I was listening to a recording of a talk by the Franciscan monk, Roman Catholic priest, and author, Richard Rohr, about finding God in the depths of silence. It reminded me of a statement that I’d heard or read once, although I don’t remember the source anymore. The idea is that when done well, when done effectively, prayer brings the supplicant to a state of silence.

Having been raised in a conservative protestant Christian home, confirmed in a Lutheran church, and then again in a Roman Catholic church as part of converting to Catholicism, I’ve reached a point where I’m not religious. Still, listening to or reading the work of people like Father Rohr, Frank Schaeffer, Brian McLaren, Joan Chittister, Reinhold Niebuhr, or Walter Brueggemann – among others – suggests that there are deeper, more nuanced, ways of approaching spirituality and the unanswerable questions in life than shrillest voices from religious people might suggest.

When something is true, it tends to be true across cultures, countries, languages, time periods, and yes religions and art forms. A well-prepared meal is good whether it’s Indian, Mexican, French, or anything else. Great artwork is great because it speaks to people and conveys beauty. And if it is great art, it’s great across all cultures and across time, even as movements or styles come and go and as popular tastes change. You can be moved to tears by the poetry of Rumi, Shakespeare, Seamus Heaney, or Amanda Gorman. Or in the same way, you can feel your emotions rise when listening to an Italian opera from the 19th century or from, say, Aretha Franklin singing in the 21st.

Where I’m going with all this is to express my own conviction that a contemplative exercise or an encounter with something profound can indeed bring us to a state of silence. And I don’t mean silence in the sense of being muzzled, depressed, or in a state that parallels inebriated numbness. I have experienced the kind of silence that I’m speaking of through encounters with nature, in places with soaring architecture, like a cathedral, as an effect of music, and when immersed in artwork that touches something inside me. The possibility of bringing a viewer of our art to a state of reverential, humble, silence seems a more worthy aspiration for a photograph than adhering to a pedantic rule about technique.

It might sound arrogant, too. I’m not claiming that my photographs move anyone to any interior state of mind. But why wouldn’t I at least try to make images that convey a sense of simplicity and beauty and mystery, by using light and color and gesture to elicit that response in a viewer?

Who knows if I’ll ever make an image that moves a viewer to sense of awe and silence? But if I’m pursuing photography as artistic expression, why would I ever try for anything less? It’s not something I think about when I’m photographing. But maybe I should be.

Thanks for reading. I hope you are well.

Still Learning to See

Abandoned motel, Utah, 2017

As children, many of us go through phases where we enjoy meals like macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, and popsicles – and almost nothing else. Fortunately for most of us, as we grow our tastes and palates mature too, so we’re able to enjoy more interesting and complex flavors in our food and drink. Similarly, with music, the pop music that thrills us when we’re in our early teens hopefully gives way to appreciation of music that requires more knowledge and sophistication from us. If we’re willing to spend the time and effort, and maybe some discomfort learning what good food, good wine, good music, and good literature is, then we get the benefit of the good stuff and our lives are richer for it.

Obviously – at least I hope this is obvious – the same is true of visual imagery. An image like the Mona Lisa or The Lord’s Supper, are sophisticated paintings, but at a basic level, they’re accessible, even if you’re not aware of what you’re looking at. On the other hand, images by Edward Hopper or Robert Adams, as well as lots of other artists, hold more significant meaning beneath the surface, while also being less superficially attractive. These folks tend not to make calendar pictures. To be clear, I don’t’ mean to portray Hopper and Adams as equivalent to Leonardo da Vinci. My purpose isn’t to compare these artists. Instead, it’s worth noting that as was the case with Leonardo, they’re creating images with more meaning than might be obvious on the surface.

To understand what’s happening beneath the surface of an image requires education. It also requires looking hard and thoughtfully at many images, spending dozens of minutes on individual images over the course of years. Becoming a connoisseur of music, food, literature or any other field of endeavor requires an equal investment of time and effort. Not many people make that effort, but those who do might be among the elite in their respective areas. Of course, calling someone elite these days can be akin to hurling an insult. But that says more about the person making the negative charge than it does about the target of the accusation, the person who aspires to expertise.

The point is that making good art is an enormous effort, and that consuming good art in any genre becomes a dialog, a give and take, between the artist and the audience. And it’s also true that if I claim that I’m trying to make better artwork this week than I did last week – and I do claim that – then I must also work to become a more educated and sophisticated viewer of artwork. And I’m trying to do that too.

Part of me thinks it might be risky to tell my audience that I’m still learning how to see and understand visual artwork. Yet why should that be? Part of what’s compelling about any artform is that we can study it, practice it, and grow with it and through it, throughout our lives. It never needs to become old. Moreover, if I were to argue or try to pretend that I didn’t need to become more educated as a viewer of artwork, wouldn’t I be saying, “I’ve got it down; I know it; I don’t need to learn more”?

Doing that would be foolish. That statement might imply that I’m doing the best work that I’m capable of now, and I don’t believe that that’s the case. Instead, I’m going forward, working under the happy assumption that I have much to learn, that as I learn more, that I’ll find greater satisfaction taking in the artwork I consume, and that I can have some reassurance that my own best work lies ahead.

Thanks for reading.

Increasing Available Reality

The American poet, Christian Wiman said in an interview that poetry “increases the stock of available reality.” I love that thought and I believe it’s about as true as a statement like that – one that can’t be proven quantifiably – can be. I think photography has the same capacity: increasing the stock of available reality.

While I don’t think that statement should be controversial, it might be worth exploring it a bit further.

Photographs are based on at least a degree of reality. The process of creating a photograph begins when light reflecting off an object is recorded on a light-sensitive surface like a chemical emulsion or an electrical sensor. But completing the process that ends with a picture requires transforming the information from the recorded light to some printed format or an image that can be displayed on a screen. Throughout the process, someone makes decisions that affect what the image looks like. It might be the photographer, or someone else who prints the image, or even the camera company that produced the software that determines how the camera processes the picture. This has been the case since the beginning of photography. Techniques for developing film, enlarging, and printing an image, and even more now with digital post processing, give photographers enormous discretion over what the final picture looks like.

Moreover, reality is dynamic, which is to say that it consists of a set of relationships that change in response to each other over time. It isn’t static. You can’t step into the same stream twice and all that. A photograph records what was happening at a point in time, at one level of being. That recording is accurate as far as it goes. But the way I see a flower as a photographer isn’t the same way that a deer or rabbit sees it, or the way that a bee or butterfly that wants the flower’s nectar sees it. If I could see the flower from the level of quantum physics, it would look different still. I’m belaboring the point, but photographers who speak in sanctimonious tones about not altering their images for the sake of the veracity of those images aren’t speaking credibly.

So, having set that absolutist and maybe confrontational stake in the ground, how can anyone credibly claim that photography increases the stock of available reality?

The reality we perceive or the truth that we try to express are problematic concepts. Our ability to express our thoughts and feelings is limited. Poets use language to describe things, and at their best, they find the language for expressing shared experience that hadn’t yet been put into words. Similarly, photography, or any visual art, can capture a feeling or perception or experience through visual means and give it a degree of permanence. I think that brings us back to a definition of reality that lives in a set of ongoing, dynamic relationships. For a poem, painting or picture to be art, it must accurately reflect some aspect of a relationship and suggest a way forward.

I feel like I’m getting deeper into the weeds that I wanted to, so let’s pull back and try to apply the concept to something more ordinary. Our civic life has endured a lot of untruth recently. People who hold differing stances on a range of subjects have made statements in complete opposition to each other. They can’t both be right. We don’t help ourselves by expressing disagreement through harsh words, violent actions, or by refusing to acknowledge the aspirations, pain, anger, and fear of anyone who disagrees with us. Art can help us get in touch with ourselves and our lives, and it can open a window into the perceptions and concerns that others hold. Artwork in all its forms, photography included, can do that. Art that expands the stock of available humanity is useful anytime, but especially so in a time of stress.

If you make art of any kind, well done! Don’t be discouraged or dissuaded from doing that work. Your work is necessary.

Art and Violence

My interest in photography as artistic expression arose from seeing a picture of the mountain named Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. The image captured the scale and rugged beauty of that rock formation. Half Dome reached its present form through the applications of extreme temperature and pressure over the course of thousands of years. It’s pretty a place. But the prettiness is the result of violence to a degree, and over a span of time, that humans can’t understand in a meaningful way.

In the picture I’m referring to, which is Ansel Adams’ Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, what a viewer sees is rock and sky. The picture doesn’t show living stuff. But there’s also a phrase about nature being red in tooth and claw, which is a reference to the struggle that living things endure, and indeed, visit upon each other, in their quest to survive and bear their young before they die. Yet a photo of lion cubs lounging with their mother that a friend made is such a beautiful, peaceful image. By itself, that picture seems to contradict what I’m saying about violence and struggle.

But if you can hold those two thoughts, Half Dome and the lounging lions, for a moment, I’m going to talk about something else and then bring it all together to make a point.

In the last year, I’ve become aware of something called the New Topographics. It’s a movement among landscape photographers that arose in the 1970s. Artists who are considered part of this movement made no attempt to show a pristine landscape mostly without human presence or impact, as Ansel Adams did. Instead, the point of the new topographics images is to show the landscape as it is, deeply impacted by human activity. And sometimes that impact is devastating, as in Robert Adams photographs of previously forested land that had been clear cut.

Another photographer who’s considered a New Topographics artist is Henry Wessel. Henry said that photography gives you two choices: where to stand and when to press the shutter. Henry and Robert’s respective careers were defined by differing judgments about what to shoot and when to shoot it.

Same with Robert and Ansel, the two Adams that I referred to. Ansel and Robert aren’t related and weren’t in the same generation. Both saw and depicted beauty in the landscape but conveyed it differently. There’s a place for both approaches, an argument to be made in support of their respective judgments. Arguments might also be made in opposition to them. Each artist staked out their position; they made their judgments; and then they went forward and did their work.

All of us have judgments to make. Life is simple from an extremely high-level perspective. We come into the world, struggle to find our place, raise our family, make our contribution, and then, willingly or not, we’ll leave. But it’s vastly more complicated at the level of individuals. We all have judgments to make. Frustratingly often, a judgment doesn’t clearly hinge on what is in our interest or not, or what is right or wrong. At its worst, we find ourselves not having to choose between what is moral or immoral, but between what is immoral on one hand and even more immoral on the other. And we don’t even always know which hand is which.

Making art also involves making judgments. The highest form of art is to create a life that’s well lived. And that, of course, is replete with judgments. Yet to be clear, we are not called to be judgmental, but to rather to exercise judgment in the context of sound critical thinking. Are we harming others? Have we made choices where our own success and well being must, almost by definition, come at the expense of someone else’s well being? Are we honest, at least with ourselves, about what we see, what we do, about who we are, and about who we want to become?

The time – this time that we’re living through right now – calls for us at the very least to be honest with ourselves. The time requires us to hold each other to honesty and integrity in our words, and in the actions that arise from our words. As artists and as people, the time calls us to care enough about the outcome of our lives to express what’s honest even if it’s not comfortable for ourselves or for those who hear or see what we’re expressing.

There is certainly violence in our time, physical, psychological and spiritual. Art can help provide a break, a bit of respite from the churning in our own mind and heart. But it can also document some of what’s harming us. Where we can, we should, at the very least, not shrink from representing the truth as we find it. Doing so is difficult, of course. It’s difficult because the violence is perpetrated by people we know, and the truth is resisted by people who matter, sometimes employers who might hold our very livelihoods in their hands. And even if that’s not the case, speaking about what’s true is often upsetting to us.

Anger, it has been said, is a moral response to what’s broken in the world. But while I think that that’s true, an effective response can’t be in anger. Rather, anger at what’s broken, harmful, and ugly, should give us the motivation and resolve to strive to heal what’s broken.

It should be acknowledged again: This is not easy. And what we believe to be right might not prevail, at least in our own lifetime. But we’re not called to do what’s easy and we’re not called to win. We’re called to do what we can to heal what’s broken, and to strive to leave the world a little better, and maybe if we’re lucky, a little more beautiful, than we found it. Please do that in whatever ways you can. I’ll try too.