Postcards from the Creative Journey

1069 What Is Necessary to Understand a Photograph? First Published 1/11/2015

“I was inspired to make these photographs by the poetry of seventh century hermit/mystics living in Remote-a-stan.” If your introduction or artist’s statement starts out like that, you probably lost just about everyone in your audience except the curator and the other five or six people that were similarly inspired by the poetry of hermit/mystic monks that lived in Remote-a-stan fourteen centuries ago. For the rest of us, we’ll just stroll around and look at the photographs. We can enjoy and understand the technical aspects and compositions of the images, but we will have an incomplete understanding of the art because the artist created a barrier to our enjoyment of the work.

One thing that makes art “universal” is a common experience between the artist and the audience. The cultural homogeneity of the audiences in the past insured that visual clues and themes would be understood and appreciated by the masses. The increasing diversity of western culture and the desire to specialize results in art being relevant a small group of viewers. Outsiders need not apply.

1068 Technology never moves backwards, and prices only move upwards.

Without the support of the family snapshot camera (are you old enough to remember those?) “professional” or “prosumer” cameras are cursed to support themselves. Those little old snapshot cameras didn’t cost much, but their profit margin subsidized the professional camera business. The smartphone has replaced the family snapshot camera. Without the profitable support of snapshot cameras, not very many people can afford to drop five to seven thousand American Dollars to set themselves up with a new digital camera system.

Is it any wonder that the more adventuresome photographers are headed back to film? Film technology is slower, not as precise and requires a small amount of luck, but at least it’s affordable.

1067 Keeping Stuff, First Published 10/18/2015

A long time ago I had the privilege to photograph a farm in North Dakota. As we went through the farm we found a veritable treasure trove of things from the past. In one room there was a stack of shirt cardboards a foot tall. A shirt cardboard could be cut down and used to patch a hole in the sole of a shoe.  A few days later we pulled open the door of an old shed and found a beautiful old single speed bike…leaning against a Model A Ford. I was told that farmers never throw things out.

Years later when we had to sell my in-law’s house we found similar caches of seemingly odd ball things held onto for years. I never could separate the underlying causes either from living through the Great Depression when everything was used up, re-purposed and recycled or whether being fifty miles from the nearest town meant that you kept everything because you never knew what emergency would be solved by something that you did not throw away.

Sometimes we are so intent on photographing something we lose the ability to think about the significance of the objects to their owners.

1066 Thinking About Words

The last couple of blogs have been about writing about photographs because I have been doing a lot of that lately. I am making a presentation to my local camera group and have been thinking and writing about photography for a couple of months. So far, (if you’ve been paying attention to these blogs) I’ve written about thinking beyond the image and writing about what the photographs are about.

One final thought is the audience. When writing (or creating any art, for that matter) one must remember that you are writing not just for yourself, but for the widest audience possible. As Brooks Jensen often says, “Photography is about Life.” Craft your words to lead your audience to the inescapable conclusion that your photographs are about their life, and experiences. Connecting to the audience makes your work interesting to the audience.

1065 Technology Leaps Backward, First Published 12/20/2015

I had a great time photographing at American Civil War reenactments for a few years but gave it up when the demands of technology became too much to overcome. Photographic technology among reenactors was becoming more authentic (read primitive) with each passing year. I knew I was finished when I came upon a photographer with a darkroom tent set up next to a studio camera with a shiny brass barrel lens sitting atop a cast iron tripod. Did I mention he brought all this equipment with him in a horse drawn wagon? Not only was the equipment vintage, he hand coated ambrotypes in his darkroom tent and developed the plates in oak buckets. (That would be hand-made oak buckets, thank you very much.)

In just about any endeavor, there comes a time when you have to make a decision on what you are trying to accomplish. Unconditional authenticity seemed to be the goal. I decided not to join them on the journey to that destination, but to forge ahead into the twentieth century.

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This image was copied from a platinum print made from a 5x7 sheet film negative.

1064 Words and Pictures Together

I knew these airplanes from the book I owned and from the Revell models I assembled with Testor’s Liquid Cement. Here they were, life size, aluminum, steel, rubber and plexiglass, the real version of plastic scale models.

There is a synergy when we put words and pictures together. Not to caption, not to describe, but to bring about a better understanding of what the photograph means. We are not authors; we are photographic artists. Writing is not our forte. Writing about what the photographs are about is time consuming thing to accomplish. Imagining the title of a project is even more difficult because you must be able to say in a few words what the project is as well as make it inviting to your audience. I have found that the best titles are hidden in the artist’s statement or the introduction to the project itself.

This image is from the project, A Boy's Dream, airplanes from the Erickson Collection in Madras, Oregon. If you like images of World War II vintage aircraft, I have an additional project, Sentimental Journey, included as part of the March 2023 Lipka Journal. 

1063 Figure It Out in Post First Published 2/25/2018

This is not a post extolling the virtues of repairing poorly seen images via obscure digital editing techniques. It is something quite different. Once you are facing your lightroom database with your latest photographic efforts in front of you, you scratch your head and wonder out loud, “Just what the heck do I have here?” I rarely use a script or “shot list” of images I need to capture to make my photo session a success. I am more likely to head out into the world to a specific (or maybe not so specific) location with the thought of capturing whatever images I might find interesting.

When in “create mode” I am acting instinctively, responding to the conditions about me, concentrating on the source and quality of the ambient light, the details of composition, worrying about what’s in the viewfinder (and more importantly) what’s around the edges of the viewfinder. In complete creative mode everything else in the world beside me, my camera and the subject has disappeared. As an aside, the (almost) complete automation of exposure calculation and focusing has certainly removed those baseline technical tasks from creating an image. I do still have the opportunity to (and still do) mess up either focus or exposure, but those failures are few and far between. If the camera does make an error (see what I did there?) I can see it almost immediately and make a change to compensate. But I digress. 

Once I return home and the images begin to arrange themselves into folios I can finally figure out what I actually did. It’s this task where I have to extract the subconscious thoughts from the photographs and make sense of them. This is what I mean when I say you are Figuring It Out in Post.

1062 Thinking Beyond the Image Itself

When you write that artist statement, introduction or other text requirement for a photographic project, the best thing you can do is think beyond the image itself. As visual people words are not our strong suit and relying on words is a difficult thing to do. We tend to think about the photograph itself and tell our story of how we made it, or how it is important to us we created the image. This is an easy thing for us to do and it is the great temptation when the deadline nears.

Resist the temptation and think beyond the image itself to what the image represents. Thinking beyond the image itself will get you closer to what the photograph really means, not just to you, but for your audience.