So that last post struck a chord with some of ‘y’all so I thought I would write about process more, specifically what we can do to break out of a rut or blow out cobwebs?
Things I have done in the past in no particular order:
Use only one camera and lens. – I think 90% of my work is done in this way, get one combination and stick to it. It also happens to be the same camera/lens combo I walk around with. I have been tempted by some recent new cameras (ricoh, you know who you are) but I ask myself, just what am I going to get that I am not getting now. It fits in a small bag, goes everywhere, and I know that it will make big prints if I want. It also happens to be the same camera I use “at work”, so familiarity in terms of camera handling is good.
Switch to a different camera entirely – The antithesis, I have done this a few times. At one point having used the square for several years I switched to a rangefinder and spent the next year trying to figure it out, all for paying clients. It was, er, well, fun. But I learned more in that year than in many others. Consider putting it out there and really doing it differently.
Use them all -For a while I would take almost one of everything on jobs, and depending on what I saw when I showed up, picked one to suit. Or always ask for one more roll as we used to say for yourself on your favourite camera.
Consider “speeding up” – In other words, don’t be so damn prissy. That probably applies to you Mr. 4×5. Use faster film so you don’t have to light, or use on camera flash and run and gun, abandon tripods, use zoom lenses, etc. Anything to free up the process and get off the toilet you are on.
Consider slowing down – I have done that too, moved to tripod, large format, larger format, just to see what you would be gaining. Come on, you know you want to try 8×10, so just do it…
No time to shoot-make time – For a while last year and the year before I was beholden to another master for certain days of the week, so I decided, I have fifteen minutes of walk time from the subway to the door, why not use that time, and I did. You will be surprised what you can find, and how late you can be! Mostly I found it put my mind into a state of awareness that I became familiar with and familiar with when it was not active, more importantly. So it carried over into other instances when I was not shooting, I would feel a shift go on, and start to “see” pictures again, so I would register them with an internal “click.” I think this awareness issue is very very important and I will get back to it later.
Too much time to shoot? – lose time – Ok, what do i mean? Simply, you are not doing the OTHER things you need to be doing, like printing, editing, making book dummies, reading about other stuff, going to movies, etc. What the hell is going on! You are human aren’t you?
Stare – Ok so we are told not to stare, it is rude, but that is for normal people. Photographers are not normal. You have to stare. Consider it part of your job. Writers are famous for eavesdropping on conversations to get a feel for the rhythm of language and usage. Staring is our eavesdropping. I’ll wager that if you are stuck or stagnant you have stopped “looking” and part of that is essentially staring. You’ll never know how something looks or more importantly how it might look if you don’t just stare. You have to see how an expression changes, the points inbetween, how the light moves across a surface, how a hand looks, how people sit, stand, run, walk. The reason is that once you have an internal memory of events, you can start to anticipate those events in your photography, and be ready for them. People say about certain pictures, “how did you do that, how did you know that would happen?” and it is easy if you are a student of life, the more you see, the more you understand what might happen, and the more you can be ready for it. So if you are stuck, consider just looking for a while, taking your time to stare and wonder.
Why make “good” photographs? – I have written about this before, but I will quote my patron saint of obfuscation, Gary Winogrand:
When I’m photographing, I see life. That’s what I deal with. I don’t have pictures in my head. I frame in terms of what I want to include, and naturally, when I want to snap the shutter. And I don’t worry about how the picture’s gonna look – I let that take care of itself. We know too much about how pictures look and should look, and how do you get around making those pictures again and again. It’s one modus operandi. To frame in terms of what you want to have in the picture, not about how – making a nice picture. That, anybody can do.
This has been my war for years. It was why in the midst of working every day I switched from an slr to a rangefinder and made a year of mistakes. You get tired of your own good pictures. Of course you look back at some of the bad ones even, and you think, well that really wasn’t so bad, what was your problem? But creativity is also about surprise. If all you ever did from now on is made pictures that you knew were “good” that would certainly cut you off from finding out another way of making “good” pictures. In other words, you have to make bad pictures to find out. So my advice is, if you are stuck, go out and deliberately try to make bad pictures. I think you will find that it is very hard to do this, and also you will find you like a lot of the bad pictures so much more than your good ones.
The majority of the work you see on flickr for example, or in Creative Arts*, or in magazines, is this way. It is hewing to “the good,” what we all accept as competent work. I’m waiting to see the anti-flickr, sort of the dustbin of photography. It used to be more commonplace in a photochemical process to make mistakes. You accidentally expose the paper, solarization is born. You over develop, you don’t fix enough, etc, all of this error produces unexpected results. Now I am not saying that we should all accept photo-101 mistakes as art, that is not what I mean. I just think there is more inspiration in our mistakes than in our victories. Some artists even embrace processes that are so finicky as to encourage this. You can see this as the anti-5D aesthetic. The problem with the current crop of digital cameras is that they are so damn good and predictable. And so boring. You can spot Canon 5D colour a mile away. It is that generic. And you would laugh if a pro showed up with an Olympus E-3 to a pro shoot. I don’t see a lot of willingness these days in photographers to accept unusual tools, they all want the CaNikon brick. And there are good reasons to use one. But do you remember, there “used to be” multiple vendors of film, multiple film stocks, polaroid, polapan, etc. Why we all hew to the norm is because of this idea that we have to make “good” pictures, meaning we need “good” equipment. So stop it already!
- Corollary: don’t abandon a process that is working because it has suddenly become inconvenient. You look at some artists and you can’t fathom why they would continue to work the way they do. Lee Friedlander is up in the mornings rocking the developer tray. Still. Well, there is “something” there very often that was hard won. Something that took a long time to develop. Those things are important too, and the last few years has seen a rush to throw out decades of existing practice. We might wake up one day and want some of that back, so don’t throw out your stainless steel tanks yet.
Confront stagnation itself – What does it mean to be stuck, or stagnant? I’ll wager it has nothing to do with your creativity and everything to do with your emotions. Specifically you are not paying attention to how you feel. And not being responsible to that. Being stuck is really just the absence of a connection to yourself. It occurs all the time, and often we don’t notice the mode switch as it happens subtly. I think men are worse at it than women because we are less attuned to watching our moods rise and fall, women get a physical reminder every month. So what happens is we lose track of what are actually feeing-the minute by minute changes in our affects. Ok, so not that often, but you know how it can go. You wake up in the morning and wow, what a shitty feeling. In the absence of a process or awareness some of us will take it to mean that this is going to be a shitty day. And it well could be for a lot of external reasons. But I am just talking about witnessing internal changes and acknowledging them. So the idea is to connect the dots between the feelings and the sources, maybe you had some bad dreams, bad sleep, left over issues, anxiety, etc. Some of this is “real” and some is just raw emotion. The point is to witness yourself over time, later in the day I have often caught myself at 180 degrees to that, calm, fine, happy, in flow, this is another “click” moment. You have to witness and acknowledge that you feel different. The more you do this the more you will see your emotions as a kind of weather, and as photographers we all know even bad weather is grounds for good photographs. You just have to wait them out and see the beauty. Paying attention like this keeps you attuned to yourself, and attuned to yourself in the world. Once you are attuned you can start responding, or being responsible as I like to say, to cultivating what you need to feed your soul. The the issue of creativity is moot, you are able to perceive and respond to your own shifts, responding to the world becomes second nature. And you are unstuck.
Participate or give back – So you don’t know what to do, at least participate in something someone else is doing, at least it might rub off on to you! Or you meet some people who are not nasty. This fall I was a TA at ICP and had a tremendous amount of fun. Teaching can be very rewarding as a way to fuel yourself or give something back. Blogs too have become a way to participate, listserves, mailinglists, etc included. I try to check in on as many as possible and contribute comments when I have time. Of course writing this folderol is very time consuming…and dammit if wordpress’s visual editor is busted. So I have to write code kiddies. Any ideas?
Abandon photography altogether – Yes you heard me. If you are really not making headway and have truly given it a lot of attention and care, maybe this is just not for you? Or maybe you have to come at is sideways and be a vendor or move to another visual pursuit. That is obviously a very personal choice, I think the point is that no one is holding a gun to your head in this, there is so much else out there to do. But it should be an active choice, a conscious one anyway. I think many photographers are products of families where the parents did not have the chance to do what they loved and instead did what they had to do to make a living. So there are degrees to this. It is a privilege to be able to do this. I think it would still be a privilege to do this as only a way of earning a living, and by that I mean using photography as a means to an end and not as a creative expression. You can choose. And you can choose to keep some of that work for yourself only, if that is what it takes. Buy a printer and make really big prints for yourself and who cares if no one sees them. There is no morality to this. Taking photography off the personal creative hot list might actually release it to something better. You could be the best pet photographer in the tri-state area!! We really shouldn’t care so much.
And the best antidote to creative stagnation – BEER with friends. At least you can bullshit about the brain cell-creativity you are killing with every pint…
Happy new year.
*don’t get me started on CA–here is party trick, take an issue of CA from 2007 and and issue from 1984 and tear out all the pages and throw them up in the air. Collect up two piles. Republish as 2008 and 2009 respectively….no one will notice…
I think you have let many of our secrets out with this. It is what we call happy accidents. Great post.
Excellent post, right on the money with so many things. Stuck is a terrible place to be, a place where I spent much of my time years ago. I suffered, and I suspect many others do also, from the paralyzing effect of the internal critic.
You know, the one that is constantly in your head telling you what a stupid photo it is that you are taking, and why are you doing this anyway, you’re a loser, your photos suck, people will notice and get mad, go home, and on and on until you slink away with your camera in your bag.
We all have to find a way to strangle that little voice in our heads that stops us before we even start. (no, I’m not off my meds, heh heh) It’s so important to have a clear and quiet mind when shooting. It allows us to be where we are without distractions, see the moments amid the chaos, respond to it all on an emotional level and make sense of it all in that defining moment when we press the shutter release. Athletes refer to being in the zone, or what I call it as being in the moment. Either way, it’s freeing to be able to just go out and respond to the environment without restrictions.
Thank you Robert for your efforts to put your thoughts into words and for sharing your insights and intellect with the rest of us.
Pardon my ignorance but what is Creative Arts?
sorry, Communication Arts…
I built a six foot tall snowman holding a beer last weekend with my wife’s younger sister and it was one of the best creative releases I’ve had in quite some time. Snowpeople drinking beer . . . what a fun time.
Thanks for another great post Robert.
Funny comments about CA, though it’s not the only mag to constantly recycle essentially the same stuff. When CA’s photo annual comes out. I think I’ll just keep one CA photo annual, and just re-read it once a year. That’ll save me $20 a year (or whatever it costs).
Hi Robert, I really enjoyed these two posts together. I am starting to take first steps towards making photography a larger part of my life. I sometimes get caught up in ideas, but then I find that it’s the shots I haven’t “thought” about that end up pleasing me the most. I have considered some of the suggestions that you’ve laid out here on my own but it’s great to see this laid out so coherently!
love you suggestions for getting out of being “stuck” and god bless the happy accidents that result from polaroids and darkrooms. “good pictures,” after a time, ARE boring. that’s why I haven’t picked up my digital in weeks and have been working with my often disappointing, but sometimes magically surprising (and financially ruining!) polaroid camera. see ya. jz