Postcards from the Creative Journey

Same Place, Same Vision

Heckman Homestead Cabin, Alkabo, North Dakota

from "A Sense of the Seasons."

One of my friends photographed the Grand Canyon. On his recent trip there he claimed to have found tripod holes in the rock at a particularly beautiful vantage point. What he said might be hyperbole, or might be true, because good photographers recognize the “right” spot for making a photograph. I am fond of preaching the only two things that matter in photography are where you place the camera and when you press the shutter. When you have photographers going into the same area and photographing the same scene, you have the high probability that talented photographers will see the same thing and come back with strikingly similar photographs. Here’s an example:

Atlanta, John Vachon, 1938 (FSA photograph)

Atlanta, Walker Evans, 1936, (FSA photogaph)

The folks over at the Shorpy website found these images and pointed out the similarities. Both Evans and Vachon saw the contrast between the fantasy world of Hollywood as shown on the posters and the reality of the Depression. These images are different only in the way each photographer “worked the edges” of their composition. It makes sense for these two images are similar because both photographers were on assignment for the FSA and looking for images based on the same criteria.

More on Vocation and Avocation

Sateran House, Crosby, North Dakota

One of my job functions is Project Management. Project Managers are really big on methodology as a way of getting things done on time and within budget. Our lives revolve around completing a series of tasks. It has become such a way of life that I do photographic projects the same way I do projects at work. As professionals, we behave a certain way to achieve success. Sometimes, we chose not to employ these same successful methods in pursuit of our hobby goals. Isn’t that an odd thing? It seems that when we leave work we leave the smarts we use there at the office and don’t employ them (if we can) when we photograph.

Determining a project’s end needs to be the first thing you think about in a project. The first thing to be done is to decide the method of display, distribution, in essence how you plan to share your vision with the rest of the world is the most important thing you can do for your project. If you don’t know what the end of the project will be, then how do you know when you get there? Without a defined ending, the project will tend to wander and will likely not be finished.

I may have touched on this topic before (with over 200 posts, it’s now a challenge to not repeat myself) but the discipline of creating a project for your artistic projects makes it more likely your project will be finished. Deadlines are wonderful, especially if your deadlines are for a juried exhibition. That’s one way to force you to complete your work. I find the combination of defining the project’s conclusion as well as a definite deadline is one way to get a photographic project completed.

 

Vocation and Avocation

Bell with Snow, Lvzu Temple, Mongolia

Most of my photographic friends are not hobbyists. They make their living from photography. They are artists, commercial photographers or deeply involved in photographic education. I do believe I am the only that “hasn’t quit his day job” and pursues photographic art as an avocation. The interesting thing about my vocation (IT consultant) and avocation (artist) is they support each other. My day job requires me to write contract documents and instructions to contractors performing work. My professional work starts by conversing with engineers and a blank sheet of paper. When we are finished, contractors know what the engineers want to build and how to build it. It’s a creative process, but certainly not with an artistic output. Whenever my work load increases, my blog activity increases too. It seems like the requirement to be creative and write spills over to my avocation and I create bunches of blog posts. I read more closely, I ask questions about thing I have written, consider other viewpoints and figure out how to expand on points I have made in other blog posts. I guess I just get in the groove of communicating my thoughts in writing and I can’t turn it off. It’s something I didn’t have the foresight to see when I got into my new vocation, but I’m really happy it’s working out that way.

 

Different Strokes for Different Folks

Two Ways Out - Fort Worden, Port Townsend, WA

What type of photographer are you? Brooks Jensen and I were discussing photographic topics one weekend and in passing, we wound up looking at some photographs on a computer screen. We had seen prints of these photographs last year. So we had a chance to compare the presentation of the images as physical artifacts as well as virtual images on a computer screen. As you might expect, the presentation of the same images in two different media was different. In this case, we thought the on screen images were a little bit better looking than the physical prints.

As a photographer, is it possible that your work more suited to one medium than another? Can you be considered an “internet photographer” if your work looks great when viewed on a computer? The Life Magazine photographers such as Gene Smith gained recognition through publication in the weekly news magazine. There are other people, like Howard Schatz and Joyce Tennyson that thrive in the book publishing world. There are many Fine Art Photographers strive to have their work displayed in galleries and museums.

My folio projects can be viewed on my website as well be seen as physical artifacts. My blog is another outlet for images that may or may not be part of my folio projects. The blog and website make it easy for my photographs to be seen by a larger and more widely dispersed audience than any gallery exhibition my images have been in. This is the reason I rarely make any photographs for on the wall exhibition. The amount of work I have to do to get a specific number of eyeballs on my work favors virtual over physical by a factor of ten in a typical year. Exhibition attendance at recent public exhibitions average about 300 people during the month of the exhibit. My annual average web site traffic is about 3600 individuals per year. The advantage to a virtual presentation is they are available as long as the internet is available.