Following the lead of others requires little effort and less courage. “Innovate and iterate” while a route to financial success and often a means of improving our efficiencies rarely produces genuinely new and imaginative things. To strike out on your own requires conviction and courage. To pursue your own goals wherever they might lead demands trust in yourself. Better to get lost having set out alone into parts unknown, than simply to tread an established path to some recognizable destination. So too in things creative.
Minimalism. A dominate subject. High contrast. Rule of thirds. Composition. Complementary colors. Symmetry. Leading lines. Framing. There is a smörgåsbord of rules I can choose from to guide my shooting, to shoehorn my photos into a recognizable and recognized style. But what if I don’t want to. What if I want not just to “break” them but to reject them? Or replace them with a different set of rules/guidelines?
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Rules and guidelines are useful for helping me see things. Francis Bacon realized this centuries ago when he worried about the challenges of inductive investigation. Scientific training depends on some modern version of the dictum about the well-prepared mind being able to see. Photography is no different. The well-prepared photographer is able to see, and to photograph. But photography is not science. There’s no sense of progress, and photographers need not always be beholden to a finite set of rules. We can reject them at will. I think we might benefit from rejecting the rules now and then. Prepare our minds to see chaotic. There can be something soothing and comforting about the mess.
Winter has happened this year, or at least February has already been properly cold and snow-filled. We’ve had some wonderful days of blowing, bitter snow storms. A thick layer of snow covers the ice on the local pond. The storms keep people inside, and so naturally I’m compelled to be out, wandering the streets and parks and open spaces. Even through the haze of snow and the monochrome winter afternoons, the promise of spring lurks in the tree branches tinged with yellow. Soon they will explode in the fresh growth of a new year. But not yet. Today winter still rules.
Often I want to be alone, to avoid the company of others. I am no misanthrope nor do I aspire to be a hermit, but the constant din of daily life does little for me. I much prefer solitude, the restorative companionship of quiet, both in an acoustic and in a psychological sense.
But it’s hard to be alone. Robert Frost, I think, understood the desire to be alone. Yet he acknowledged the futility of that desire. I too seek, as often as possible, similar opportunities, moments where I can choose the less certain, the less worn option. My initial excitement, however, soon mixes with a sense of melancholy as I come to see that I have not succeeded in avoiding the company of others. There seems always to be traces of predecessors; I can’t help but see evidence that I’m little more than the latest follower. And I know that my passing can’t help but encourage others to follow.
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That wet afternoon I had hoped to be alone. The cold rain and gloom discouraged others from intruding on my peace. But I wasn’t alone. I saw in the path I followed the evidence of those who had passed before me, some recently had left footprints in the soft dirt others more remotely had helped to beat down the grasses and to shape the path itself. I could almost hear the echoes of their footsteps, whether lightly landing on hard, dry soil, or tramping through the soft, wet mud. I stopped regularly to listen to the water falling onto the leaves and from there dripping onto the grasses. I lingered for a moment.
Then I turned and set off into the thick. I struggled to make headway. Soon I was drenched from pushing through the undergrowth. Finally, after considerable effort I came to a small clearing at the top of a rise. The dense woods sloped away in front of me, seemingly impenetrable. I looked down and saw a shard of glass, the remnant of an old bottle. Even here I was not alone.
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Originality is, I think, just another form of seeking to be alone. And it is equally difficult to find. Somebody has been there before me; somebody will come after.
It was early, sometime around 7:00 AM. She sat there swiping at her phone, her bright red dress blazing against the grey stone. The only movement was her finger, flicking up and down on her phone’s screen. Her partner was a flurry of activity, directing the bride and groom where to stand, how to pose, which direction to look. He moved them around the courtyard and the parapet and the stairs. For more than an hour he took photos. For more than an hour she sat there, leaning against a decorative column.
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This photo recalls all that we’ve lost in the last year or so. This woman is no longer allowed to visit the city — like me, she was a visitor to the city. Her partner is no longer taking photos of such weddings, luxury destination weddings. Travel restrictions, both domestic and foreign, have halted such extravagances. At least her phone works today just as it did that morning when she ignored the beautiful foreign city around her.
Dublin’s colorful doors are legendary and even staid London has a long tradition of colored doors, though not as dramatic as Dublin’s. Lots of photographers produce series of photos of these doors, photos that end up on countless postcards and posters, typically with catchy names like “The Doors of [fill in city name].” Now that we’ve moved into a post-postcard world, snapshots of those doors probably fill social media feeds. When I find myself in cities known for their doors, I want to be attracted to them. I take photo after photo of them. I vary the composition. Yet I’m never quite satisfied.
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The color contrast and textures never quite reproduce in my photograph they way I imagine them. They’re interesting, sure, but something is missing. This photo, for example, works well as a souvenir. I see the cracked, teal doors and recall immediately walking along the little side street, the morning sun warming my limbs. I remember waiting for a car to pass so I could step out into the street to take the photo. But is there more?
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This one works better. I like the window poking out from behind the wall, the only splash of color. The dead plant on the right highlights the layers in this photos. Reminds us that there is space between the front wall and the window. The beam set into the adobe on the left is like a question. Why is it here? What does it support? I think there is more nuance in this photography. It hints at something.
Closer to home, I still try to make colored doors interesting. Philadelphia has no shortage of opportunities. I find that the doors in alleys and behind buildings more attractive. Perhaps because I think they are more suggestive. They imply a history filled with people living lives, moving goods, trying to slow the building’s ruing, surrendering to the ravages of time only to try, now and then, to paint over the decay.
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Maybe these doors are more interesting to me not because they have been painted some vibrant color, but because they are part of a micro-ecosystem. I like these doors because they prompt me to build a story around them, they reveal layers and layers, each one another history. Colored doors are fine and all, as visuals, but I want my photographs to be more than a pleasing visuals.
The patterns created by the stairs and shadows intrigued me, as did the contrast between the parallels of light and dark, on the right, and the smooth, evenly lit surface on the left. I like the photograph I made that summer afternoon, I like it because it reminds me of the afternoon wandering the gardens, and I like it because I think the two halves present an interesting contrast. But somehow the photo doesn’t capture what I saw in my mind when I took it. It falls short of my imagined picture and include aspects that distract. But I still like this photograph.
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My dissatisfaction with this photo has nothing to do with the picture itself and everything to do with how the picture fails to compel the real world to conform to the image in my head. A translation error prevents me from mapping the ideal world onto the physical world, the world in which I live. I am reminded of Plato’s story about the Demiurge, his quasi-divine, omniscient but far from omnipotent creator. This Demiurge was burdened with creating the messy, flawed world we humans inhabit out of some ideal, eternal, and immaterial world of forms. In every instance, however, the Demiurge was thwarted by the recalcitrant matter that refused in random and unpredictable ways to conform to the plan. We are left with the flawed, decaying real world filled with things that only approximate their ideal models. With every photograph I am enacting in some limited, two-dimensional way the Demiurge’s struggles. I have access to an ideal photograph that exists only in my imagination, but my efforts to realize that photograph always fall short because the world refuses to conform to my ideas.
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The contrasting halves, the crooked lines converging at the top, the tooling marks on the steps, the eroded stone captured my attention. I took a dozen photos of this scene, and although I like this one most, it too fails to capture what I saw. Within the self-help and motivational cottage industry there is a sector devoted to the pursuit of perfection. On the one hand, somebody with a fancy wireless mic pacing around a stages for three to ten minutes urges us to stop letting the idea of perfection paralyze us. The self-help language stretches and distends the aphoristic: “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” On the other hand, somebody, often on the same stage with the same fancy wireless mic and for the same three to ten minutes, reminds us that by striving for perfection we can achieve greatness. The motivational language expands and dilates the aphoristic: “…if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” The messages are honest, earnest, and affirmational.
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The fractured steps, the weeds, and the graffiti all attest to the impermanence and imperfections of human creation. Plato’s Demiurge never stopped creating imperfect, flawed, degenerate and degenerating things. The goal was not to produce perfect but to produce imperfect. For by considering the limitless series of imperfect humans might glimpse the perfect, or at least imagine it. The imperfect encourages us to reflect, to contemplate, and to imagine. So celebrate the imperfect for it is the only way to bridge the gap between the real and the imagined.
Stairs always promise something, escape, adventure, death, the unknown. What waits just out of sight past that last step? What lurks below in the gloom that devours the stairs? Moqui steps scratched into soft sandstone, the ruins of some steps leading to a long-gone building, or modernist stairs in a city museum. Stairs are always more than the physical steps. They are a promise of something new. They are an echo of something lost. Who made these, and why? Who has climbed these step before, and why? Stairs invite reflection and wonder. They beckon. I follow.
With the new month comes a new postcard. This month’s postcard comes from a local state park. Winter seemed to demand black and white. Let me know if you want a copy.
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Just days later the freezing temperatures and snow would come. But this morning I enjoyed the mild weather and the lovely falls.
For me, creativity fulfills its purpose when realized in the creation of something. I am not particularly bothered if nobody likes it (either in the traditional sense of like or in the social media sense of like). I don’t take pictures, make photographs, collect moments and scenes, or write words either hoping for approval or fearing disapproval. I create when I want to create something. It is an act of thinking, of reflecting, of musing, of imagining. I create for an audience of two, an audience both intimately familiar and entirely foreign. I create for my present and future selves. Each photograph, each paragraph a souvenir, a memento mori, a requiem.
