# 5906-08 / around the house • kitchen sink • landscape ~ as easy as waking up and falling out of bed

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CREATIVITY and IMAGINATION ARE 2 WORDS /CONCEPTS WHICH ARE bandied about in discussions of the making of pictures. They are often used interchangeably, as in “use your imagination more” and/or “try to be more creative”. Hell, I can not count the times I have heard, re: my pictures, “your choice of subject matter is very creative” or “I would never have imagined that as a subject for picture making”.

Not that I don’t appreciate the comments-cuz I do-but those comments leave me ever so slightly perplexed cuz I do not associate the idea of creativity or imagination with the act of my picture making. Written sImply, when I make a picture I am just picturing what I see and do so in the manner in which I see. Saying that I am being creative or using my imagination while making pictures is like saying that I am being creative and using my imagination when I put put one foot in front of the other while walking down the street.

As a result of how I make pictures, specifically pictures that are intended to be art, I believe that there are 3 very suspicious / questionable bits of picture making-in the pursuit of finding your vision-advice: 1.) find a subject / referent you are very interested in / passionate about and make lots of pictures thereof, and, 2.) be as creative / imaginative as you can be, and, 3.) don’t be afraid to break the rules.

Re: questionable advice #1: following this dictate the chances are very good that, unless you are passionate about a very obscure and/or little known object of affection, you’ll be making pictures of a subject a lot other picture makers are picturing. Re: #2: creativity and imagination pursued for their own sake will head you straight down the road of cliche picture making. Re: #3: forget breaking the rules and concentrate on making your own rules.

iMo, the only advice worth a damn-employed in finding your own unique artistic vision-is to make lots and lots of pictures of any thing and every thing (no thinking allowed) that catches your eye and and pricks your sensibilities, using a single camera, one lens (or 2, a semi-wide and semi tele). Make small (cheap) prints and look at them. Following this activity for, say, 1/2 a year, I would be surprised if ,when you lay out the pictures, you don’t find some that; 1) capture the look and feel of what you saw, and, 2) stick together as a unified body of pictures.

The purpose of this activity is to discover and, hopefully, begin to understand how you actually see the world. That is, not in a “creative” or “imaginative” sense, but, rather, how you literally see the world using your visual apparatus / senses, just like you do when you open your eyes in the morning.

# 5901-04 / around the house • kitchen life • kitchen sink ~ easy does it

note from a gallery director to staff ~ (embiggenable)

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ON A RECENT POST ON ANOTHER SITE THE IDEA OF EDITING one’s work came up. The general response to the post was that editing one’s own work is hard / difficult work and there were suggestions by commenters, re: how to make editing easier.

In my little corner of the picture making world, editing my work has never been hard or difficult. That is so for a number of reasons. One important reason is the fact that, even though I make a lot of pictures (nearly 13,000 pictures in my “finished” picture folder, all made over the past 20 years), those pictures are the result of making very considered single POV selections for making a picture. I rarely “work” a scene other than an exposure bracketing so in most cases it’s one-and-done. The result? There are not a lot of frames to sort through.

Add to that situation, the fact that I have a very high good picture success rate (feel free to call this a conceit), I do not spend much time having to decide whether a picture is a “keeper” or not. That written, some of my keepers are better than others.

How I determine which pictures are merely good, which are better, or which are best, aka: editing, is based upon the same premise I employ in my picture making…that is, trusting my vision-both literal (what my eyes perceive) and figuratively (perceiving forms that are recognizably derived from real life). Or, to put in in other words, I picture whatever pricks my eye and sensibilities and I determine whether my pictures are good / better / best based upon how they prick my eye and sensibilities.

That is, when a picture hits my eye like a big pizza pie and then shakes my nerves and rattles my brain, it slides into my “best of” folder and usually ends up on a wall (my home, in a galley) or in a photo book.

# 5899-5900 / kitchen life • kitchen sink • around the house ~ imagination deficit disorder?

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OVER MY YEARS OF INVOLVEMENT WITH THE MEDIUM of photography and its apparatus (more than half a century), I have been confounded by many of the activities that fall under the heading of the word, photography. As a matter of fact, I have always been hesitant to use the word photographer to describe myself, re: my picture making activities. I have always been a picture maker although albeit in my professional life I labeled myself as a commercial photographer, emphasis on the qualifier commercial.

In any event, one of the many continually confounding-it could also be called a depressing disappointment-items that rattles around in my head is the fact of the never-ending adherence to picture making conventions by the picture making throngs. That is, the unimaginative conformation to the “rules” of a given picture making genre.

An example…I once went on a spree of making pictures of flowers with the use of my flatbed scanner. I started posting them on the FLORA forum of a nature photography site. The moderators of that forum went bat-sh*t crazy cuz, you know, what I was doing was (they actually stated this) insulting to “real” flora picture makers. Picture makers who had specialized equipment-lenses, reflectors, scrims, diffusers, lighting (flash), tripods, et al-that they hauled around in their pursuit of a “proper” flora picture. The matter got very heated and the outcome was not in their favor, so they picked up their marbles and left that site to form their own site. You know, what better way is there to protect and define the rules of proper flora picture making than by walling off verboten thought?

That written, it was Brooks Jensen who wrote…

“Real photography begins when we let go of what we have been told is a good photograph and start photographing what we see.”

…and it was Robert Adams who wrote that we don’t need more of:

“the cliché, the ten thousandth camera-club imitation of a picture by Ansel Adams.”

So, all of the above written, my question is, why are so many picture makers unable to break out of the box of proscribed / convention-bound picture making?

And, BTW, why is it that so many picture makers don’t make prints / put pictures on their walls? If, indeed, that is true or is that a myth?

# 5897-98 / around the house ~ who cares about the mechanics?

the heat don’t work cuz the vandals took the handle ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

window needs cleaned ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

I AM GIVING THOUGHT TO NO LONGER TAGGING MY pictures with iPhone nomenclature. I started doing so shortly after I began pictures almost exclusively with an iPhone. Doing so was instigated by the desire to be a kinda poke-a-stick-in-the-eye of the idiots who were, and many cases still are, denigrating the iPhone as unsuitable use as a “serious” picture making device.

What has got me to thinking about ending this nomenclature practice is the fact that I have become increasingly sick to death, re: camera fanboys/girls who are forever telling us what a marvelous-the best camera ever made-camera they use…I’m especially addressing-but not exclusively-the Leicophiles-like the guy out there who wrote, “Seeking the wisdom of generations of Leicophiles”-out there who think their pictures are something special cuz they use the Leica system. Although, in my experience, all that bragging usually means that the pictures are actually nothing to write home about.

In any event, I have no desire to be considered / viewed as an iPhone fanboy. So, I think the solution is to have a single all pictures made with an iPhone unless otherwise noted statement on my blog and WORK page. That is, unless, of course, Apple decides to underwrite my picture making with a $100K grant.

# 5895-96 / around the house ~ inertia

New Years Day morning ~ on and on it goes (embiggenable) • iPhone

the rooster doesn’t crow at dawn ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

I NEVER MAKE NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS. IT SEEMED foolhardy that, if there was something that needed resolving, why wait for one specific day to do so.

In any event, I do have some goals as I enter the end of my 75th year on the planet. A few of those involve photography but nothing earth-shattering…maybe starting a new body of work-made with the ultra-wide angle iPhone lens-and updating my existing bodies of work with the possibility of adding of few new pictures to some of them.

The other item on my non-resolution list is to figure out what I am doing on/with this blog. With 1.5K visits / 2K page views a month, it ain’t dead yet but I feel as though I am just making it up as I go along. That written, there is a voice in my head that keeps telling me that I need a more specific focus on the blog. I keep telling the voice to shut up the f**k up but it refuses to accept that directive..

# 5888--89 / around the house ~ to drink or not to drink?

you only live once ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

MERRY HOLIDAYS, EVEN THOUGH I AM A DAY LATE and a dollar short (as the saying goes).

Actually, due to a mis-communication between the wife and myself, I am more than a dollar short on account of the fact that I spent $540.00USD on a very limited, recently released bottle of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg (Vol II) bourbon. FYI, the bottle is adorned with Dylan’s Sunset, Monument Valley painting. The leather case is individually numbered.

However, one question remains, drink it or save it as an investment? Last year’s Bootleg (Vol I ) limited release is sold out. Currently it sells for $1,000.00USD on the secondary market. And, the price will only go up.

# 5884-86 / around the house • kitchen life • people ~ feeling it

I’ve been taking my temperature more often lately ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

the light switches are in the off position ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

carpet protects the porch floor from heel marks ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

ON MY LAST ENTRY, A COMMENT WAS LEFT BY STEPHEN McATEER:

Some people I used to read on the internet seemed to think that a photograph had to have 'Meaning' to be any good….My own view is that it is a good photograph if it pleases the eye. Meaning does not interest me in the least.

To clarify my thoughts on meaning to be seen / found in a photograph, I believe every photograph ever made has some meaning or another, even if only to the individual who made it. However, that written, once the photograph is offered for viewing to those other than the maker, what the photograph means (if anything) is anyone’s guess.

Truth be written, I spent a lot of time, used a lot of internet space, and typed a zillion words over the years (on this blog and my previous blog) speculating / festering, one might even say “obsessing” about meaning in photographs. ASIDE: Stephen might even have been taking a shot at me, re: “used to read on the internet” wise. END OF ASIDE That endeavor was due primarily to my concern, re: did my pictures have any meaning? That concern was based up my very loose acceptance of the idea that “a photograph had to have 'Meaning' to be any good”.

After intense and protracted looking for meaning in my pictures, I discovered that, shockingly, there was none to be seen / found. However, what I did find was that all of my “good” pictures shared a common characteristic - that is, they all incited feelings and sensations instigated by their visual-senses activation. There was nothing to" “interpret”, nothing to “understand”. Their “goodness” was predicated upon how a picture looked and how that “look” pricked my eye and sensibilities.

If how a picture looks is the basis for a viewer to look for meaning in a picture-literary, cultural, art theory, historic connections, et al-so be it. I am not suggesting that there is nothing of the sort to be seen /found in my pictures. However, in the making of my pictures I am not trying to instill / insert any meaning. My intent is to make visible the experiences I see / feel as I traverse the planet-with my eyes wide open-in a manner that pricks my eye and sensibilities and of those who view my pictures.

That written, and despite the fact that the visual referent(s) depicted in most of my pictures is not what the pictures are about, some of those pictures can, and do, hold special meaning for me.

So, when all is written / said and done, I do not see meaning v. pleasing to the eye as mutually exclusive ideas. My only problem with meaning in photography is with those who elevate meaning, aka: content, over form. Or, when doing so, eviscerate a picture by dissecting / breaking it down into pieces.

FYI, you may noticed the non sequitur-like captions with the pictures in this entry. I am playing with the idea of mis-direction, re: providing a caption to a picture which causes a viewer to try to figure out what a picture is really about cuz it can not possibly be about what the caption seems to imply that it is about.

# 5873-75 / around the house • kitchen life ~ picturing experience

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JOHN SZARKOWSKI WROTE (c.1976):

…it is true, as I believe it is, that today’s most radical and suggestive color photography derives most of its vigor from commonplace models…[I]n the past decade a number of photographers have begun to work in color in a more confident, more natural, and yet more ambitious spirit, working not as though color were a separate issue, a problem to be solved in isolation (not thinking of color as photographers seventy years ago thought of composition), but rather as though the world itself existed in color, as though the blue and the sky were one thing….[they] accept color as existential and descriptive; the pictures are not photographs of color, any more than they are photographs of shapes, texture, objects, symbols, or events, but rather photographs of experience, as it has been ordered and clarified within the structures imposed by the camera.

And, speaking of experience, here’s what Joel Meyerowitz had to say:

“I don’t want to talk about one aspect of these pictures over the rest. The fact is, I’m trying to photograph the wholeness of my experience. I’m trying to pass that experience back into the world…[T]hat’s what it’s about-the location of the subject, it’s about the passage of the experience itself, the wholeness, though you back into the world, selected by your native instincts. That’s what artists do. They separate their experience from the totality, from raw experience, and it’s the quality of their selections that makes them visible to the world.”

Add to the idea, re: Szarkowski’s and Meyerowitz’s photographing experience, Meyerowitz’s sensation of “feeling”…:

“I see things-this is my life-I look; I make visual images…[I]t’s what I’ve done since I was a kid. I feel things…[I] love sensations. But ,within the limited range of sensations that I am responsive to, certain optical things excite me...[I]f I am in a good place, where there’s lots of visual activity, I become supersensitive. I receive many signals and I pick and choose among them.”

…and I have started to think that I need to reassess the idea of so-called “vision “ as it is most commonly bantered about / understood in the “serious” amateur picture making world.