As I make more books and things (collections of postcards are in the works), I increasingly think of photos in series. I don’t deny the power of a single, amazing photograph, but there is a value in seeing photographs as part of a collection of related images. I have long appreciated the powerful work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Series can be as short as a pair of photos, a diptych, or much longer series, such as 52/4.
From a recent trip to the Great Sand Dunes I have a number of nice, single photos as well as a number of photos that work well as short series. The images are fine on their own, but work really well as a triptych.
I don’t know quite how to begin. These ideas are just beginning to take shape. Maybe I can start simply, by describing what concerns me, what seems, at least to me, to be a problem.
The other day, while stopped at a traffic light, the two people in the car next to me were both consumed by their phones; behind them on the corner a pedestrian stared at his phone as he leaned on the light pole waiting for a walk signal. This morning as I stood third in line to order coffee, the person in front of me hunched over her phone. The woman behind me at the market, having loaded her groceries onto the belt, pulled out her phone while I paid my bill. When I look around, such scenes repeat themselves everywhere — we don’t dare spend a single moment in idleness. I worry we have lost something important by filling every instance with an endless source of distractions.
Urban #230510.2.
Neil Gaimon is reported to have said: “Ideas come from daydreaming. They come from drifting. So if you want to get a good idea for a book, you have to let yourself get so bored that your mind has nothing better to do than tell itself a story.” Gaimon’s point applies to more than writing books. Daydreaming, drifting, boredom are the source of and essential for creativity. In idleness we become bricoleurs, collecting fragments of the world around us that we arrange into something new.
Urban #230510.3.
Most of the things we create will seem, at first glance, of little value, but upon reflection we might begin to appreciate both the process of creating them and, now and then, the things themselves. Each item will, after all, be something we have made, something we have added to the universe, proof that we have been here. Each will reflect us at a particular moment. Photographs, for example. Through a process of selection and exclusion, each one is an assembly of pieces from the world around me. Each reflects ideas and anxieties, joys and sorrows of a particular moment and a particular place. Each also offers a seed for later reflection, a chance to try to recover what concerned me at the time or opportunity to tell myself a story about what happened to the scene afterwards.
Urban #230510.4.
Bricolage is the process of assembling the fragments of your surroundings into something new — Gaimon’s comment about telling yourself a story. It’s what the bricoleur does, it’s what the author and the creator do. It takes practice to fit pieces together, to grasp how different shards can be combined into a harmonious whole. Idleness, boredom, drifting — these are the times we practice assembling those shards into something coherent and new. If we deny ourselves those idle moments we deny ourselves the chance to have ideas. When we outsource those ideas to algorithms and other people (who are, typically aping something they have seen on their phones), we lose the ability to think and create for ourselves.
Urban #230510.5.
The world is a fascinating place, if we just take the time to look around, if we lose ourselves in doing nothing. Idleness is, it seems, essential to creation.
I envy Vivian Maier. Not because I like her work — I have seen too few of her photos to know what I think of them, though I doubt they would appeal much to me. No. I envy Vivian Maier because she seems not to have cared whether or not I liked her work, or had any ideas about it one way or another. She seems not to have given a single thought to any audience. That must be liberating, a particular type of freedom that encourages a more sincere form of creativity.
Urban #230717.
In my taxonomy, Maier didn’t produce art so much as engaged in creativity. She answered to some siren call that others were not able to or privileged to hear. She made photographs that she wanted to or had to make. Maybe she produced for an audience of one, herself. I am always impressed by that person who strives to do something, to make something, to realize some inner need even when or especially when nobody is watching.
Parts for some hand-made books — pages, covers, and glue.
I create things I need to create. I guess in some sense I make things for somebody else, though not for some specific somebody else. For me, creating something and leaving it in the world completes the process. The dopamine rush comes from making and leaving, not from some affirmation or condemnation in the form of likes or dislikes, follows or unfollows, thumbs up or thumbs down.
Recently finished hand-made books, soon to be left somewhere.
I guess I would call this a type of a-social media.
That a photograph must tell a story is commonplace. “Storytelling” has conquered every form of photography, from landscape to street photography to elaborately staged scenes. I prefer to see photographs as fragments, extraits from a now lost present. John Berger remarked on the gap between the moment photographed and the present, saying
All photographs are of the past, and yet in them an instant of the past is arrested so that, unlike a lived past, it can never lead to the present.
Urban #230727.1.
Photographs, in being fragments contain only traces of their own immediate pasts. From those traces we imagine a thousand different possible pasts that remain entombed like some ancient insect in the amber of the past.
— make something every day, something for an audience of one; — give away the things I make, leave them behind, stash them on shelves in stores, send them to strangers, and otherwise cast them into the universe for others to find; — look around with the eyes and curiosity of a child; — talk to strangers to learn how they see the world; — laugh at the things I find important; — be me, because if I don’t nobody will be.
Slunk Emo ceremoniously attached the lens. The live stream on Stumbler broadcast through the universe video of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Slunk Ome, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the circuit when he threw it. The switch that would link, all at once, all the sprawling algorithms and computing devices—from servers to personal computers, phones, smart watches, and internet-enabled appliances, more than ninety-six billion machines–into the super algorithm that would connect them all to the 47.8 exapixel camera, creating one massive opti-cybernetics machine that would combine not only all the photographs ever taken but also all the photographs ever imagined.
Slunk Ome spoke briefly to the billions simultaneously refreshing the page. Then, after a moment’s silence, he said, “Now, Slunk Emo.”
Slunk Emo threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power through trillions of neural networks mining data from even the obscurest corners of the internet, including abandoned NoLongerMySpace pages. Servers strained and pages buffered and bandwidth limits were exceeded. After a few moments Stumbler’s network caught up to the surge in users.
Slunk Emo stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of requesting the first image is yours, Slunk Ome.”
“Thank you,” said Slunk Ome. “It shall be a picture that no single photographer has been able to take.”
He turned to face the opti-cybernetics machine. “Can you now create the perfect photograph?”
A mighty voice answered without hesitation, without a single click of the shutter.
“Yes. And now there is a perfect photograph.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Slunk Emo. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the hot shoe struck him down and fused the switch shut.*
Urban #230718
Meanwhile, a guy with a camera sits at the local skating rink taking blurry pictures.
[*Based on “Answer,” a short story by Fredric Brown.]
I had an appointment in the city the other day. Given the train schedule, I would either arrive about 45 minutes early or 5 minutes late. I opted to arrive early so that I could spend half an hour or so taking pictures in the beautiful train station.
Urban #230510.0
The station was bustling with people — commuters, students heading home for the summer, tourists arriving in the city. In the 30 minutes I spent in the station, I took a bunch of photographs that I will assemble into a small book, “30 Minutes in 30th Street.”
Urban #230510.1
Once I make a bunch, I’ll leave them in local coffee shops and Little Free Libraries in the area. Just the latest in my pamphlet and limited editions projects. Let me know if you want one.
I went to see a show last night, an album celebration show. The music was great, but what really impressed me was the musicians. Sure, there were a number of people there to see the show, but our presence was irrelevant. Watching the band play and especially E.J., the front man, I saw a person who creates because he has to create. He would be writing and performing songs whether or not anybody listened. If he took the place of that famous tree in the woods and nobody was around to hear him, he would still be making and performing music. He creates. His creations might also be art, but that’s irrelevant to him.
Urban #230324.0
The show reminded me that I make photographs for me. Some of them will be “original,” others will look like numerous other photographs. The last few weeks have been drippy around here. I started to notice puddles on sidewalks as an opportunity to look at trees in a different way, to take the season’s last photographs of trees before the leaf out. For the next week or so I took lots of photos of trees reflected in puddles on my commute to and from work. Pictures of reflections are a dime a dozen, even with inflation. I will not take an original picture of a reflection. But that assumes I take pictures with an audience in mind, one that has surely seen dozens of pictures of reflections. By that metric, pictures are little more than the subject captured in the frame. But this misses the point, at least for me.
Urban #320324.1
I don’t care if at first glance my photos look like pictures everybody has taken. Those photographers are not me and did not take my photos. If, as Wim Wenders has asserted, the camera points both directions, forward at the subject and back at the photographer, then photographs I take of reflections are not like anybody else’s. They answer to my questions and concerns and aesthetic sensibilities. For that reason, when I take a picture or print a photograph, I think only of one audience, an audience of one: me.
Urban #230324.2
I make the photographs I need to see in the world, not the photographs I think the world needs to see. Maybe that’s the difference between creating and making art. While the latter fulfills its purpose when an audience interacts with it, the former fulfills its purpose by existing. I am not an artist but rather a person who creates.
The vagueness of a daily photography project or the magnitude of a “365 project” has always put me off. A more finite, one still life each day for a month, worked better. Even that project, however, lost some of its appeal by the end:
However, I have largely disliked this project. I find it dull. I have fallen into the habit of thinking that making the single photograph (which I do each evening) is sufficient. As long as I do that, I’ve accomplished something for the day. Consequently, I find myself taking fewer photographs as I wander with my camera. As if I’ve replaced taking photos of the world around me with taking my daily flash photo.
The monotony was both too boring and not sufficiently compelling. As I said at the end of that project, maybe something more focused — my version of Micheal Beirut drawing his left hand every day, or Joseph Sudek photographing things in his window. An important aspect of such a daily project, for me, is prompting me to look at the world in new ways. Trying to capture that aspect, I have been working on a daily project this past month: “One Thought Per Day.”
The book I made in which to record one thought each day. That thought becomes the seed for that day’s photograph.
I made a little booklet, a sort of diary. Early each day I write a thought, sometimes a question, on the day’s page. From that thought I generate a single word. That word guides me as I look for a scene (I don’t get to stage it — I must find it) that relates to the day’s word/thought. I get to take one picture.
The thought I had for April 16, which guided me when I took that day’s photograph.
The page above shows the thought for April 16, 2023. Posturing, pretending to be something I am not, was the thought that I sought to find as I went through the day. I found, standing on a windowsill in the department lounge, a small articulated mannequin (why an IKEA mannequin is in the lounge I can’t imagine). It became the day’s photograph.
Still Life #230416
At the end of the month I will print the day’s on a page the precedes the day’s photograph, and then assemble them into a booklet (the same dimensions as the diary I use to record the thoughts). In the end, I’ll produce a small booklet, 2 1/2″ x 4 1/4″, of about 60 pages — 30 thoughts and 30 photographs, which I will hand bind.
For me, the combination of thinking, writing, searching, and photographing has been really productive. Guided by an idea or thought, I have looked at the world around me for scenes that somehow capture that thought. I have found that I spend more time thinking about the world as I move through it. I don’t know if I have taken more pictures because of it, but I think that I’ve put more thought into most of those pictures.
I also just love making things, material things. I enjoyed making the little booklet in which to record my thoughts. I am looking forward to making the booklet filled with those thoughts and the photographs they generated.
As with most of my projects, I will likely make a handful and leave them places, cafes, Little Free Libraries, benches, wherever. I’ll probably send some to random people as well. For me, that is an important part of my entire project. Casting whatever I make out into the world (Nick Tauro Jr.’s version of this is brilliant — if only I had an old newspaper box).
