Postcards from the Creative Journey

It’s a Passing Fancy

A Back Stair in the Parliament

In my Orientation Post I wrote about making my own calendar for 2013. That happened because the company I work for creates their own promotional calendar using employee photographs. The selection of images is done democratically with my fellow employees voting for their favorite photograph. The first year my entries weren’t selected I was kind of put out, because I usually do well in juried events. Artist’s lives are filled with failure and rejection. That’s part of the deal we sign up for when we choose to share our art with the world. But after this year’s rejection, my voyage to the depths of despair took an abrupt U turn when I saw the selected photographs. To be unfailingly polite about it, my photographs just didn’t fit in with the vision of my fellow employees. To which I offer them my hearty thanks for not making my photographs part of that collection.

That rejection was the impetus for creating my own desk calendar for the year. The Shutter Sisters web site had a template for a nifty little desktop calendar that would fit in a CD jewel case. I made a few changes to the Shutter Sisters template and on a Sunday afternoon I made my own personal calendar filled with nothing but horizontal photographs. It was an afternoon event providing both amusement and therapy to raise my spirits in the face of artistic rejection.

Orientation, or How Do You Look at Things?

In Kensington, I think.

(Finally, a horizontal photograph!)

Vertical or Horizontal? Do you have a native orientation for you photographs? I noticed this a few weeks ago when I decided to make a calendar for 2013. I needed to come up with a dozen photographs that I could live with for a month at a time that are horizontal. All horizontal? That made it much tougher for me to deal with because quite a few of my compositions are vertical (or portrait) orientation.

I have noticed this whenever I edit images for a portfolio. My vertically oriented images seem to be stronger than their horizontal brethren and many of them are favorites. When I sequence images in a folio, I separate the horizontal and vertical images. This separation is a personal choice due to my limited skills in desktop publishing, but it does highlight the difference in the number of photographs I chose for my folios.

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According to the data on my blogging software, this should be the two hundredth post of this blog's lifetime. Here's to you readers, a thanks for taking the time to read the blog.

Seeing More Than Rocks

 

Rocks, Utah

(I pretty much had to use of this photograph

because of the topic, don't you think?)

 

After I wrote up last week’s words, I thought a little bit harder on the types of photographic vision and Minor White in particular. White’s penchant for creating equivalents is based on representing his thoughts and feelings in photographic terms. The only weak point with this premise (for me, at least, because Minor White is judged by many to be a Master Photographer) is that it requires the viewer to be pretty much in tune with the thoughts and feelings of the artist. If you are not tuned into the inner thoughts of the artist the work pretty much loses its full meaning.

One can enjoy the ability to organize the elements of a photograph, the artistic skill that it took to create a print, the light and textures of the natural world captured at precisely the right instant. In short, one may enjoy a demonstration of the photographer’s craft. At one time, this enjoyment was sufficient to declare a photographic success because of the difficulty of making great silver gelatin prints, but it’s not even close to meeting the photographer’s intent for the art. To fully understand the work, you have to be mentally in tune with the inner thoughts of the photographer.

This is where I have a couple of problems with inner focused photographers. Because the work is so cerebral the size of the audience for the work is limited to those people fully in tune with the photographer. While this approach almost surely guarantees a small audience, the small size is compensated for by the zeal of the community that responds to the work. Zeal is a great attribute for an audience.

But when passionate devotees rhapsodize about the prints made by this week’s “most important photographer of our time” and I do not share this level of euphoria, my response, “I don’t understand the photograph’s meaning,” gets me that “Oh, we’re sorry” look and the conversation stops. The first impression is to feel artistically inadequate because you’re not privy to the secret knowledge.

What is the utility in the message that cannot be understood? An artist discovers something of importance and takes the time and effort to create art to communicate this important thought. Yet the thought is buried so deeply it is missed by all but a few people. It’s a shame to waste all that work.

What Type of Vision Do You Have?

Chapel at Blenheim Palace

I would suggest there are two basic types of photographic vision. One type is a vision that is based on what your eyes see. The other type of vision is based on what your mind sees. The question is, do you photograph what your eye sees or do you photograph what your mind sees? I started thinking about this a few months ago when Brooks Jensen interviewed me about a Minor White photograph for the LensWork web site. Minor White created photographs that were the equivalent of a thought or feeling. Because his photographs originated in his mind and moved out into the world, it really didn’t matter too much where he photographed because he could always find a photographic subject that he could present as an equivalent to his thoughts or feelings.

And the rest of us?

Our photographs start out there in front of the camera and hope that in going through the camera (and maybe a whole bunch of other processes) we can conjure up an image to communicate our thoughts or feelings to our viewers. It’s a much different approach, moving from the physical to the emotional/mental than going in the opposite direction. This method of creating photographs does allow viewers to appreciate the image based purely on aesthetics while not “getting” any of the deeper emotional or philosophical aspects of the image’s intent.

Objects Are Not Larger Than They Appear

Somewhere in the Parliament Building, London.

In reviewing the photographs in one of my folios, a friend said my “landscape” oriented images looked smaller than the “portrait” oriented images. (That’s horizontal and vertical for you folks that haven’t made the transition to the computer reference to image orientation.) It’s quite true. The vertical images do look larger than their horizontally oriented brethren.

It took me a while to come to terms with that comment. I finally remembered the images are the same size. When I process images for use in a folio, I standardize my image size because it makes creating the folio so much easier. Standardization facilitates automating many processes and reduces the amount of repetitive work I have to do. As a result, the images all have the same long side dimension. (That’s a preset option when exporting images from LightRoom). My InDesign folio template (another time saving process) has identically sized frames for the images. The only thing that changes on each page is the placement of the image/project title. Even though they occupy the same amount of space on the sheet, the vertical image “looks” larger.