The days grow longer, already noticeable in the evenings. I will miss the dark mornings, early sunsets, and the long shadows cast by the pale winter sun. Light this time of year is magical.
Urban #231223.1
This woman sat in a small cone of warm light, shifting her gaze from the table in front of her to the darkening street outside. Now and then she lifted her cup to take a drink, absentmindedly setting it back down on the counter. She seemed content, at ease.
I love summer’s early sunrises and long days. But I will miss winter’s somber tones. Like many, I suffer from a sort of January melancholy, not because the days are short and dark but because they grow longer and brighter.
The NY Times publishes a puzzle, “Connections,” that presents you with a grid of 16 words and challenges you to find groups of four that share something. In a recent puzzle, for example, “charcoal, ink, paint, pastel” form the group “Art mediums.”
Perhaps I can think of photography in a similar way. Set out to make small collections, groups of three or four photographs. Each group coheres around a particular idea. That something will be totally arbitrary, idiosyncratic to my sense of grouping. “Activities that start with ‘S’,” for example, or “Things people do in a city,” or “Random group of four photos that I can group together in some trivial way,” or “Green.” Maybe such a game can guide me as I make photographs.
I could also look back at pictures I’ve made and see if they fall into groups. Let’s try. In this little game of “Connections,” can you make two groups of three photos? What links those three photos?
I don’t quite know how Hopkins meant this comment. His poetry suggests, to me, that he meant he didn’t write popular verse. He wrote for an audience of one or maybe for no audience. He wrote what he needed to write and didn’t give any thought to how people might read it.
Urban #231223.
Hopkins’ comment pairs well, I think, with a poster I saw the other day:
it’s not always about what you make, but the fact that you are creating.
Today’s economy of exposure demands that we create in the hopes of gaining validation from some imagined audience of potentially thousands. Succumbing to that demand prevents us from making the things we want to see and risks constraining our collective creativity.
Repeat as needed: Be comfortable enough with yourself to create what you need to create. That’s what matters.
If it is art it is not for all, and if it is for all it is not art.
This comment seems to call into question Karl Ove Knausgård’s link between challenging art and Protestantism, not because Schoenberg doesn’t agree that art is difficult but because Schoenberg clearly didn’t link art to Protestantism. Whether Schoenberg’s description of music, Calvino’s of literature, or Knausgård’s of photography, the idea that art is restricted to the enlightened few, the properly educated, the cultured, those with the luxury of time and money to appreciate it, explains why I don’t consider myself an artist.
Urban #231013.6.
I create meaningless things, sometimes those are photographs, sometimes magazines, sometimes books. I create things I want to see in the world. Those things might be sufficiently layered to invite different interpretation, or not. It doesn’t matter. If nobody likes them. That’s ok. If everybody likes them. That’s ok too. It’s not like I’m trying to make art.
The woman sitting at the table outside is the only person not consumed by a screen. She divides her time between a book on Chakra Healing and the tiny dog in her lap, which she has wrapped in a blanket despite the bright, warm day. She looks up eagerly when anybody approaches as if hoping to see an old friend after a long absence. A wide-brimmed hat casts a dark shadow across the top half of her face. Blue-tinted glasses hide her eyes. A large, leather bag lies open on the seat next to her. Conspicuous among the jumble of personal items is the bright yellow journal poking out of the top of the bag. What does she write in the journal? Notes from her Chakra Healing book? Thoughts on the young couple that stopped to pet her dog? Sketches of what she sees? Questions for the person watching her from inside the cafe? She takes the journal out, retrieves a pen, pushes her book to the far side of the table, and prepares to write. For a couple minutes she stares off into the distance, wondering perhaps what to write. Then she changes her mind, cuddles her dog, and returns both pen and journal to her bag. She also puts the Chakra Healing book into her bag. She scoops up her dog still wrapped in its blanket, grabs her bag, and walks down the narrow street.
Urban #231013.5.
A mile away, a different, slightly older woman slouches outside another coffee shop, next to two yellow plastic toy trucks she had carefully arranged on the ledge when she first sat down. She struggled with her phone, treating it more like a microphone than a telephone. Holding it in front of her, she would say loudly “I can’t hear you” and poke at the screen a few times. She would then quickly raise the phone to her ear and just as quickly pull it from her ear, saying once again to the screen, “I can’t hear you.” Her conversation continued like this for a surprisingly long time. Eventually, she stuffed her phone into her bag and wandered off, leaving the toy trucks on the ledge. I don’t know if she came back for them.
Seven women sit in the cafe. I’m the eighth person. Aside from the worker’s voice that carries, the room is quiet. One woman is writing something, her pen poised above a pad of paper. One woman reads a book. Two are working on class assignments — like most students, “work” seems to mean announce that they have assignments to finish, and then to talk to each other about non-assignment issues (e.g., “I’m looking for an audio version of that book I wanted to read” and “My Spotify smart list introduced me to lots of new music” she said as she put in her earbuds). Another woman just entered and put her stuff on the table nearest me. She ordered an iced chai.
The three workers behind the counter pass the time by telling stories.
Urban #230916
Three more women just entered; an old man followed them in. They stopped to put there stuff on a table. He walked straight up to the counter, ordered a large black coffee — “No” he replied when asked if he needed room for cream — and immediately left with his coffee. The women order lattes, one with vanilla.
So went the first hour of business. Maybe the incessant rain discouraged customers from coming in.
The old guy is asking questions, offering suggestions, and taking notes. He’s there with a young couple, planning the music for the couple’s wedding. At first glance he looks like the leader of some cover band, but he’s probably DJ. A full head of lovely silver hair, he is in his mid-60s and easily twice the age of the couple. She does most of the talking. Her fiancé sits quietly, nodding his support when she looks his way. The old guy directs most questions to the young woman. She fields even those the the old guy tosses to her fiancé, who seems overwhelmed, a confused spectator in his own life. The fiancé’s physical presence exhausts his role. His being there is evidence of his agreement with the planning decisions made this morning.
Urban #230909
She, by contrast, has arrived prepared and eager to engage. Consulting her computer screen, she emphasizes her responses with a chopping motion of her right hand. Occasionally her left hand reaches out to touch her fiancé’s shoulder, but her attention remains focused on the old man. She steps through various stages of the event: while guests are being seated, walking down the aisle, entrances, first dance, father-daughter dance. The fiancé nods appropriately. When he looks to the side to retrieve his coffee, fatigue flashes across his face. He shifts, uncomfortable in his chair. He doesn’t share her enthusiasm for this process. Will the fiancé remember this episode? Does the music matter to him? Maybe. Maybe not. The music will likely have no more of an impact on him than the flower arrangements, the menu choices, or the photographer whose serviceable but unremarkable photographs will rot in some drawer amongst a pile of other USB thumb drives filled with important memories.
As they stand to leave, the young woman hands the old guy an envelop, she looks at her fiancé who, on cue, extends his hand and thanks the old guy. They say how excited they are to be working with him. They leave. The old guy puts the envelop in his bag, walks up to the register, orders an oat latte, and sits back down.
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.
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.
