How to find time every day for photography, in seven easy steps:
Open Calendar app.
Create 1-hour meeting: “Take pictures”.
Set up reminder for 15 minutes before meeting.
Set event to repeat each workday for entire month.
Don’t schedule anything else for those times. (if I must schedule something for that time, immediately reschedule “Take pictures” meeting)
When reminder sounds, stop whatever I’m doing & find camera.
Head out with camera & take pictures for an hour.
As far as I can tell, all those pseudo-aphorisms about inspiration and art boil down to the same thing: Make the time. So that’s what I do. I make the time.
Karl Ove Knausgård is suspicious of photographs, or any art really, that he likes for primarily aesthetic reasons. A profound Protestantism, he thinks, rejects anything that comes too easily, that doesn’t require effort and work. He worries that he must contemplate a photograph in order to discern its meaning and therefore its significance. Only such photographs that demand such reflection and analysis can be art. This assumption, whether explicitly linked to Protestantism or not, seems common amongst both photographers and people who talk about photography (and also seems to justify, at least in part, the ubiquitous “artist’s statement”). To be art, a photograph must contain but conceal some aspect of the photographer’s identity or philosophy. Often, photographs are mechanisms of self realization and self expression. They must have a real intention.
Today, amongst real photographers and connoisseurs of photography, few compliments are more damning than “beautiful.” Art, it seems, is not beautiful or even pretty, but is meaningful and revelatory. Art demands that we acquire the knowledge to appreciate it as art. Pretty pictures are dismissed as “calendar” or “hotel” art.
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I find such an approach limiting and elitist. I am perfectly happy for some creative expression (art?) to have layers of meaning that the sufficiently prepared viewer can disentangle and appreciate. But I am unwilling to imply that only such creative expressions are art. Insofar as I care about other people seeing my work, I would rather thousands of hotel guests looked at one of my photographs as they walked through a lobby than a handful of visitors pondered one while they stood in a gallery. This photograph has no deeper meaning. It is merely a photograph of a flower that somebody found visually pleasing enough to hang in an office. That’s good enough for me.
Whenever I see a new picture I immediately seem to like and find aesthetically pleasing, I am suspicious. This cannot possibly be good, I think to myself. This cannot possibly be art. It feels like the spontaneous pleasure, the immediate sense of aesthetic satisfaction I derive in such instances is too easy and too shallow to be called a true artistic experience. … This take on art is clearly Protestant, since a genuinely Protestant person such as myself, for whom Protestantism is part of the marrow, can appreciate only what has come of hard work, only this has value, and holds nothing but disdain for what is given or easily taken, which is associated with sloth, idleness, indolence.
Karl Ove Knausgård, “Inexhaustible Precision,” 40–41.
La photographie, ainsi que je la comprends, est simplement un autre moyen de prendre des notes. Comme toutes notes, les notes photographiques sont forcément incomplètes, car il se peut qu’elles n’expriment pas le sujet sous toutes ses faces, mais chaque photographie doit toucher l’essentiel du sujet car le déclic rend cette photographie définitive.
H. Cartier-Bresson, “Afterword” for a book never published.
John D’Arcy was a wealthy landowner who built this castle ca. 1818, just outside the town he founded. He and his family lived in it for about twenty years. After he died, his son inherited the castle and lived there until the family went bankrupt about a decade later. New owners. Renovations. Yet more new owners. Yet more renovations. Finally, decline and ruin. Now, 200 years later, only the shell still stands looking out over the land and the bay.
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The original construction was mediocre, lots of rubble and junk, rough-hewn stone stacked up into walls that were then covered with plaster. Remnants of decoration, also made from cement or plaster, cling to the walls, as does the ivy. Inside little remains besides dirt floors and piles of fallen stone. Trees and plants grow where floors used to be, and graffiti cover many walls.
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The ruin also stands as a reminder that not long after we go our carefully assembled collection of photographs and photographic equipment will fall into disuse and disrepair. How many photographs and slides lie in boxes in closets, attics, storage units? How many cameras, both expensive and cheap that took hundreds of precious photos, mold in basements? Families no longer gather around to watch slide shows from last summer’s family vacation. Few people pull albums from shelves to thumb through the pages of photographs.
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With recent moves to digital photography and the near refusal to print images, how much easier will it be for the next generation to discard our photographs and cameras? Hard drives full of images will fail before too long, 4 to 5 years for mechanical drives. Cameras will break. They’ll be recycled or thrown away at e-waste events. We think we have this impressive collections, but like D’Arcy’s castle they are little more than a pretty façade.
It is important for us not to compare our work to the work of others, as challenging as that may be. It is simply human nature to look outside ourselves, rather than face that which exists internally. Comparison is ego-based and unproductive in the long run.
I continue to be inspired by Mapplethorpe’s photographs of flowers. The quiet puttering around as I set up and move lights is a pleasure. The way the process encourages me to study the flowers and to see things I would otherwise miss. It’s quiet and contemplative in an otherwise noisy world.
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Anyway, I’ve updated the Two Photos page with two new photographs of flowers, tulips this time.
“Digital Asset Management” is not my strong suit. I don’t consistently “tag” photos. My organizational scheme reflects more my experiences in making the photograph than the subject of any given photo — I tend to group images taken at a time and place. Consequently, I end up with digital piles of images in directories that resemble the boxes full of photographs forgotten in closets and attics, often with some now cryptic label on the top like “Vacation, ’68”. Yes, I am thwarting technology and ignoring the “solutions” built into the tools I use.
Abstract #180624.1
Using some stand-alone “DAM” application or the features built into the other tools I use would make finding images quick and painless. I could sort images by tags. I could see at a glance trends in the pictures I take (or at least trends in how I tag those pictures). I could assemble collections of images that spanned years. If I developed a robust and capacious tagging practice, I could find connections between images that I might not initially have expected. I could “harness the power” of my computer to make my work more efficient and discover things I wouldn’t otherwise see.
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Similar arguments are made regularly about the importance for libraries and archives to transform their record keeping from paper to digital. The assumption, often an unexpressed marketing goal really, seems to be that targeted identification and retrieval is somehow an unalloyed good and certainly better than the more cumbersome practices that require people to move through the archives.
But I enjoy moving through the archive. I enjoy browsing the real and digital shelves, pulling a box off one just to see what’s inside. The thrill of stumbling across something I didn’t know or didn’t remember existed. It’s like finding that box of photographs, “Vacation ’68”, on the top shelf of the closet. You weren’t looking for it, but you put aside your previous task to leaf through the photos, trying to figure out who these people were and where, and trying to recover or invent the stories surrounding these photos.
Sure, even if I developed a robust tagging and retrieval system, I could continue to browse the shelves and digital boxes and stumble across things. But I wouldn’t. I would become lazy and soon would completely forget how to browse, forget the joys of serendipity and the pleasure of getting lost. Easy will always win, in the end. And every time easy wins, I lose something important.
Abstract #180627
Yes, I will lose track of countless images. That’s ok. I don’t need to keep precise track of all of my images. For me there’s a value in thumbing back through and finding photos I had forgotten, and recalling the larger story that goes with them. Sometimes it takes only a single image to recall an entire trip or season. My archive, insofar as I have one, is meant to be explored. It is the source not of images but of recollections and stories and imagination.
“Flowers are too easy,” a friend cautioned when I mentioned my fascination with taking pictures of flowers. Apparently, anybody and everybody shoots flowers. I noted that Robert Mapplethorpe’s Flora was a beautiful meditation on flowers, reveling in their diversity and the many ways they can be arranged and lit. He seemed surprised that such a famous photographer would spend so much time photographing flowers.
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I find Mapplethorpe’s photographs of flowers infinitely inspiring, as I do Josef Sudek’s The Window of My Studio. In both cases the photographer explores all the ways light and shadow play shape form and line and contours, while using only a very limited subject. I find the exercise at once meditative and challenging. When successful, I also find the photographs beautiful.
It was a miserable day. Cold and windy, and then cold, windy, and snowy. Stores closed early because the “winter storm warning.” Most people wisely chose to stay home, warm and dry. A perfect day, it seemed to me, to go for a hike. Thick leaden clouds and blowing snow created a sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland of dead trees and empty spaces. There was no palette — everything shaded from black to gray. Nearly every scene was hauntingly beautiful.
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On days like this I am drawn by the sirens’ songs and venture out into the howling winds. The discomfort and physical effort compensated for by the chance to be alone and the opportunity to photograph scenes few other people will experience.
