# 6460-64 / scrub • scraggle • tangles ~ creativity & imagination

February 8, 2023

“If you have a magic camera that can take a sharp, clear, well-exposed, well-focused, and color-correct picture of most anything, what are you going to photograph? And, at a deeper level, how are you going to express yourself using photography in a way that is individualized or idiosyncratic to you specifically…?…that personal expressiveness and a stylistic identity…” ~ Mike Johnston

FOR THE BETTER PART OF A WEEK I HAVE been struggling with the subject of this entry, i.e., creativity and the imagination in the making of photographs. Specifically so, in the cause of making fine art photographs. I wrestle with the concept of creativity / imagination, re: fine art photography, cuz, to be honest, I do not think it plays a part in the making of such photographs…

…Huh? Say what?

Isn’t creativity/ imagination the answer to Mike Johnston’s question, “…how are you going to express yourself using photography in a way that is individualized or idiosyncratic to you specifically…?…that personal expressiveness and a stylistic identity…” that sets one apart from the maddening crowd.

iMo, the answer to that question is quite simply, “No, it-creativity / imagination-is not the answer.”

To clarify my opinion, let me emphasize the fact that I am addressing the making of fine art photographs as opposed to the making of decorative photographs. That’s cuz, in the referent-centric, decorative photography arena, the repertoire of creativity / imagination most often, if not always, consists of the application of art sauce, aka: flashy technique, “unique” picture making POV (body position), special gear (lenses and the like), and the selection of traditional, spectacular / dramatic-so called “picture-worthy”-referents.

Whereas, in the idiocentric, fine art picture making world, the only application of what might be labeled as creativity / imagination is the use of the picture maker’s innate-not something you can buy at B&H Photo-“individualized or idiosyncratic” vision in the making of his/her photographs; the vision which directs-one might even write, “demands”-what and how a picture maker photographs. More often than not, he/she considers the referent and its visual essence as inseparable with no need to tart it up with any art sauce.

While there are many differences, re: fine art v. decorative photography, one primary difference is that decorative picture makers tend to employ creativity / imagination in the cause of making pictures that scream. “Look at me and let there be no doubt about what my pictures are about.”

Whereas, fine art picture makers have more respect for the viewer inasmuch as they see no need for cheap tricks in order to garner and hold a viewer’s attention and interest. And, in the brave and simple act of presenting to a viewer the unvarnished true-to-the-actuality-of-the-real-world that which has pricked his/her eye and sensibilities, he/she lets the viewer discern what their pictures are about.

“I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it's got lots of accounting going on in it--stones and buildings and trees and air--but that's not what fills up a frame. You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.” ~ Joel Meyerowitz

Moral of the story: if you need to think about your picture making, spend more time thinking and getting in touch with (aka: feeling) discovering, understanding, and nurturing your vison than you do about being more “creative”.

# 6451-59 / photography for commerce ~ didn't feel much like work

February 5, 2023

***Pittsburgh Symphony*** ~ hand colored photos (embiggenable)

***Duquense Club coffee table cookbook*** ~ (embiggenable)

***Duquesne Light Ad*** ~ (embiggenable)

1 of 7: **KODAK** America’s Story Teller ~ (embiggenable)

***Hospital Sports Medicine / Rehab Ad*** ~ (embiggenable)

***Magazine Restaurant review*** ~ (embiggenable)

***death in the ER*** ~ from *A Day In The Life Of An Urban Hospital* coffee table book ~ (embiggenable)

***self promotion pieces*** ~ (embiggenable)

FOR 30 YEARS I WAS ENGAGED IN PHOTOGRAPHY FOR COMMERCE. I.E. making pictures for advertising, marketing, corporate communications (annual reports, et al), editorial (consumer / business magazines) clients. My areas of practice included still life, food, people / fashion, editorial and photo journalism. I had different portfolios for my different areas of expertise. Clients included KODAK, XEROX, Bausch&Lomb / Ray Ban, Corning, amongst many others, including a 1-time shoot for Playboy Magazine.

My studio was equipped with; multi-bodies / 8 lens Nikon system, multi-bodies / 3 lens Bronica ETRs system, multiple view cameras - 2 8x10 / 3 4x5 + assortment of lenses, and a number of specialty cameras - Polaroid, rotating lens panoramic cameras (2) and the like. Lighting was multiple high-output studio strobe banks and heads soft boxes (up to 8x8ft). There was a full kitchen and 2 darkrooms -1 for bw / color film processing, 1 for bw / color printing.

During those 30 years-c.1970-2000-most of my personal picture making was “limited” to the making of thousands of Polaroid family snapshots. The only exception being a few years-c.1980-83-when I was fiddling around with an 8x10 Deardorff making urban landscape pictures. Although, during that same time I did manage to make a few pictures during trips to the Adirondacks which were multiple year award winners in The Carnegie International Natural World Photographic Competition.

Upon my move to the Adirondacks in 2000, I exited the full-time commercial photo world for that of being a full-time Creative Director at an ad agency. That gig was similar to my commercial photography career in that there were lots of creative challenges to be had. That written, while I missed the photo making challenges, I did not miss the challenges of running a small business.

FYI, all of the pictures in this entry were made on film. No digital capture was involved. That includes the leapers in the Sports Medicine picture-an in-camera single frame capture. Death in the ER pictures were made with a rotating-lens Widelux camera. The self promotion pieces were made with Photoshop but the photo pieces were made on film.

# 6443-50 / bodies of work ~ stumbling down a dead end street #2

February 3, 2023

***Life without the APA*** ~ (embiggenable)

***Adirondack Snapshot Project*** ~ (embiggenable)

ACCORDING TO THE IDIOT QUOTED IN MY LAST entry, I have apparently been “repeating the same basic work, for decades and decades, unaware that I have been stumbling down a dead end street”. That would be because I have been making pictures driven by my very own picture making vision. A vision that does not allow me to go careening around the technique / visual effects / gear-obsessed picture making landscape like a drunken sailor. To wit, I see what I see and that’s how that I see (all credit to Popeye who said, “ I am what I am and that’s all that I am.)

That written, re: careening around like a drunken sailor, I will readily admit to careening around the referent landscape like a drunken picture maker. A picture making condition condition (affliction?) that I call discursive promiscuity. To my eye and sensibilities, any thing and every thing is fair game for a picture making possibility. The result of that discursive promiscuity is that I have accumulated, over the past 25 years, at least 15,000 pictures.

One might think that that glut of pictures would make for a very unruly mess. However, that is not the case cuz, thanks to the guidance of my vision, the overwhelming majority of my pictures exhibit a consistent,-but not formulaic-very particular attention to form, aka: the “arrangement” of the visual elements-line, shape, tone, color and space-within the imposed frame of my pictures.

This “consistency” leads to a very interesting result; while I rarely work with the thought of creating a body of work in mind, nevertheless, I have, over an extended period of time, realized that my eye and sensibilities have been, and still are, drawn to specific referents again and again. The result is that eventually-many times over the course of years-I “discover” that I have, in fact-albeit inadvertently, created many bodies of work.

ASIDE the body of works illustrated above, with a few images each, are some of the bodies of work I have created, most of which were “discovered” in my library (as opposed to deliberately created). The are at least 6 more bodies of work I could display. END OF ASIDE

And, what I find interesting and very surprising is that, once a number of referent related pictures are organized into a body of work, the coherent consistency of vision is, quite frankly, amazing.

Makes me quite happy that I have not tried to “re-invent” my vision. And BTW, I really like the “street” I am on. It is not a “dead end” and, in fact, there is no end in sight as far as I can see.

# 6438-42 / decay • common places • people ~ stumbling down a dead end street

January 31, 2023

“Established artists sometimes find a "comfortable" style that brings them success in the moment .… And they find themselves repeating the same basic work for decades and decades …. They seem unaware that they are stumbling down a dead end street …. Their real impetus going forward should be re-invention and an embrace of their vision of now …. A new format. A new color palette. An unusual angle. But the core of the original vision stays the same …. But art doesn't really work that way for the vast majority of artists.” ~ by an unnamed idiot

AS MENTIONED IN A RECENT ENTRY I WROTE that the plethora of bad advice from “experts”, re: picture making, is akin to all the hay you encounter when looking for a pin in a hay stack. The pin in this case being good advice.

The perpetrator of today’s bad advice example is advancing the idea that an artist’s vision can be sloughed off like yesterday’s clothing and a new suit of clothes-”re-invented” by the dictates of what’s happening now-can be manufactured whole cloth. This notion is so far off the mark, re; vision (which by, BTW, is not a “comfortable” style) that it’s difficult to know where to start. However ….

…. let’s just start with a re-fresher course, re: an artist’s vision. An artist’s vision is the bedrock on which all of his/her art is created. It is deeply personal. ASIDE It can not be “invented” therefore it can not be “re-invented” END ASIDE Rather, it reflects who a person is, what he/she believes, and how he/she sees-literally and figuratively-the world. iMo, it is often innate, waiting to be discovered and, ultimately understood. And, wait for it (this will piss off a lot of people)…it cannot be taught.

“Can photography be taught? If this means the history and techniques of the medium, I think it can…if, however, teaching photography means bringing students to find their own individual vision, I think it is impossible … As for studio courses in ‘seeing’ … I was never tempted to take one … Arrogantly, I believed right from the start that I could see." ~ Robert Adams

Nevertheless, it can be learned. That is, learned from a fair amount of picture making experience. Picture making which centers around just picturing what you see, not what you have been told is a good picture, and beginning to recognize how you see. And, once learned it is my belief that it can not be un-learned anymore than you un-learn how to breathe.

Of course, once one’s vision is identified, one will apparently-according to our idiot expert-be doomed to unknowingly stumbling down a dead end street for decades and decades, all the while repeating the same “basic” work. What shame.

And, here’s a clue for our clueless expert … discovering, understanding, and refining one’s vision and being grounded by it for the duration of one’s art making life is, quite actually, the way art works for a vast majority of artists.

PS bringing one’s bedrock vision to bear on a wide variety of referents is quite different than bringing “A new format. A new color palette. An unusual angle.”, aka: a “comfortable” new style to bear on one’s picture making.

# 6423-37 / comon places • common things • still life • people ~ meaninng schmeaning

January 30, 2023

***Quality butcher*** ~ Scotland (embiggenable)

“Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.” ~ Susan Sontag

IN MY LAST ENTRY I PROCLAIMED THAT, re: the medium of photography and its apparatus, it’s the same as it ever was. I believe that to be true albeit with one notable exception; the Major League Division of the Fine Art Photography World. To wit…

Over the past decade or two, fine art photo galleries and art institutions have been taken over-I would venture to write”hijacked”-by the Academic Lunatic Fringe. That is, at the directorial level graduate degrees-MAs /MFAs-are the norm and, consequently, the work being exhibited or acquired adheres to the ALF dictum of meaning trumps visual content. Or, in other words, what a picture means is much more important than what a picture depicts. Concept is the thing, which quite frankly is to be expected of academia, aka: the home of ideas.

The unfortunate (iMo) results are two-fold; 1) most ALF pictures are, to my eye and sensibilities, visual flops, and, 2) the pictures are always accompanied by a bloviating art speak explanation, re: what the pictures mean. The explanations are, iMo, virtually indispensable inasmuch as the pictures, in and of themselves, are rarely self-explanatory. In fact, after being told by a picture maker exactly what his/her pictures are about, I rarely see in his/her pictures whatever it is the maker is trying to express.

“University presses [ed. +fine art photo book publishers] increasingly hold to the policy that requires books of pictures to incorporate “substantial” texts…. layering together pictures with the photographer’s words, [ed. or more likely an academic’s essay] but also sandwiching the concoction between slabs of social—scientific balloon bread. ~ Robert Adams

To be completely honest, I should make it clear that my dislike, re: this sad state of photographic affairs, is predicated upon a very selfish desire to be visually engaged when viewing photographs on a gallery / art institution (or even online) wall. That is, as opposed to pictures of the self-pyschoanalyzing, navel gazing “investigations” by some so-called lens-based artist’s obsession with the “intersection” of some aspect of a social-scientific balloon bread concept and his/her inner self/life.

# 6427-31 / nocturnal • common places ~ the night is filled with shadows

January 27, 2023

***fiddling*** ***while house burns*** ~ fireman taking a picture (embiggenable)

SPOILER ALERT: well, not really. However, this entry will divulge a key part of my intro for the Philosophy of Modern Pictures book/project. To wit….after a lot of thought and research, I have come to the conclusion that the more things change, the more they remain the same, or, as David Byrne sang, same as it ever was.

Ever since the introduction of the digital picture making age, there has been considerable caterwauling and lamentation-don’t get me started with the monochrome crowd who can tell you the day the music BW died-re: the landmark, tradition changing, revolution about how picture making has change. To which I call, BS.

A far as I can see, sure, sure, light sensitive picture making substrates has changed from film to digital, print making has changed from the wet darkroom to the desktop / software ”darkroom”, and making good pictures, technically wise, has gotten easier BUT, paraphrasing Robert Adams…"

“…the only thing that is new in art [insert “photography’ here] is the example: the message [insert “photographs” here] is are, broadly speaking, the same-coherence, form, meaning.”

In other words, the medium and its apparatus are still inexorably / intrinsically a cohort of the real. That is, we all continue to make pictures of real-world referents-you know, people, places, things. Sure, sure, the tools have changed, but the “message” remains the same.

Of course, one could argue, what about all that special effects / filters / digital constructions stuff? Answer: one of the earliest “movements” in photography was Pictorialism and continued through the ages with Jerry Uelsmann as one of many prime examples. However, virtually all of their works, aka: acts-of-the-imagination pictures, start with pictures of referents snatched from the real world.

iMo, and that of many others, those making acts-of-the-imagination pictures are not photographers. In point of fact, they are artists-often referred to as photo artists-who employ the tools of the medium and it apparatus to create images, not photographs. And, there ain’t nothin’ new ’bout that activity.

So, from my point of view (literally-how I see the world-figuratively-my picture making vision), everything is the same as it ever was.

# 6422-26 / common places • common things • civilized ku ~ what am I spota do master?

January 26, 2023

“I really didn’t have much to teach. I didn’t really believe in it. I felt so strongly that everybody had to find their own way. And nobody can teach you your own way…. in terms of art, the only real answer that I know of is to do it. If you don’t do it, you don’t know what might happen.” ~ Harry Callahan

IN MY SEARCH FOR A NEW BOOK WHICH IS built around a large number of digital photographers’ work-to date an unsuccessful search-my search query yielded up a seemingly endless number of landfill-worthy how-to digital photography books and workshops. Many with an emphasis on how to make so-called “fine art” digital photographs.

Needless to write, none-and I repeat, NONE-of the self-proclaimed “experts” were making pictures that had any resemblance to fine art. You can take that assessment to the bank based upon the absolute fact that, to my extensive knowledge, there is not a single bona fide fine art photographer on the planet who would even consider the idea of making a how-to book. That’s cuz they understand well the verse of poet X. J.Kennedy:

The goose that laid the golden egg Died looking up its crotch To find out how its sphincter worked. Would you lay well? Don’t watch.

Or consider this from Robert Adams:

“Photographers are like other artist too in being reticent because they are afraid that self-analysis will get in the way of making art. They never fully know how they got the good pictures that they have, but they suspect that a certain innocence may have been necessary.”

iMo, how to operate camera or use editing software-or, for that matter, process film and make prints in a wet darkroom-can be taught. In any case, it ain’t rocket science but hooking up with someone who can show you ropes can speed things along. But, while anyone can figure out how to make a picture, getting to the point where one’s pictures are considered to be fine art is not so easy.

The hard work arrives in the form of identifying and then understanding how one sees the world. That is, both literally and figuratively. No one can do that but you. For some it comes easy, for some its much more difficult, and, dare I write it, for some it is impossible. ASIDE Re: impossible; that’s where the “rules” of photography come in handy for those can’t figure it out for themselves. END ASIDE

The danger involved in looking for “expert” solutions to the hard work issue is that, upon choosing an “expert” from whom to get advice on how to make “great” pictures, one is more apt to become a photo groupy of sorts-aka: follow the leader-than one who is apt to free one’s mind from the boundaries of conventional picture making. As Brian Cohen says in the film Life of Brian:

You’ve got it wrong. You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals. You’re all different. You’ve got to figure it out for yourselves.

Of course, as Brian exhorts the crowd to be individuals-”yes, we are all individuals” they respond collectively-they repeat all he has to say as dogma / doctrine. I guess that explains why all the “experts” are so successful at finding recruits for following their picture making “wisdom”.

# 6418-21 / windshieds • landscape • common things • common places ~ by nature self-explanatory

January 24, 2023

“Art is by nature self-explanatory. Its vivid detail and overall cohesion give it a clarity not ordinarily apparent in the rest of life…so if the audience lives in the same time and culture as does the artist, and the audience is familiar with the history of the medium, there is no need to append to art a preface or other secondary apparatus…Words are proof the vision that they [the artist] had is not…fully there in the picture…[and] is an acknowledgment that the photograph is unclear-that it is not art. ~ Robert Adams

AS I AM PREPPING / DOING RESEARCH FOR the philosophy of modern pictures project /book, I am rereading, in part, a number of books in which the author-most often a photographer of some note-is writing about the medium and its apparatus. Which is to write that they are not writing about their own work. However, their writing could most often be described as that which, in general, could be applied to defining their own work.

That written, I have presented the preceding Robert Adams quote to draw attention to a dilemma of sorts that I am facing, re: my writing for the PoMP project/book.

As mentioned in a previous entry, the primary tongue-in-cheek impetus for the undertaking of this project was, and still is, Bob Dylan’s recent book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. That written, it should be noted that there is not a scintilla of actual philosophy in Dylan’s book. And, likewise, there will be no philosophy of anything in my book.

In Dylan’s book, he has selected 68 songs-none of which are his own songs-and proceeds to tell us what goes on in his head-thoughts and feelings-when he hears those songs. Some of which is humorous, some of which is quite creative, and some of which is downright scary-but all of which is interesting and could be understood as a look at what drives his own song writing.

My book, on the other hand, will be illustrated with my pictures. Reference and commentary will be made to the pictures made by others-what I think about them and how they have influenced my work. However, while I will not be writing specifically about my pictures, the project/book will be a look into my head, re: what motivates my picture making.

The hope is that the project/book will not be perceived as a exercise in self-indulgent hubris. Rather, that it will be found to be an interesting, for some, look into how one picture maker employs the medium and its apparatus in the creation of what I believe to be interesting pictures.

FYI, I never thought of it before, but, in my prep / research I have been surprised by the realization that I have more books-monographs and photo theory-by Robert Adams than any other picture maker. Second place is awarded to Vivian Maier. The strange thing about this is that they are both BW (aka: monochrome) picture makers*. A picture making genre which does not hold much interest for me, picture making wise.

*Maier did make some color pictures but she is best know for her BW work.