Postcards from the Creative Journey

509 Writing the Artists Statement (Part 2 of 3)

Imaginary Landscape, San Jose, CA

Whiskey, wine and your writing are similar in that they do better after aging. Letting your words rest for a bit might quite possibly cause improvement. I’m not sure why it happens, but it is a mystery I have encountered again and again. Waiting a bit allows you to read and see the your writing through fresh eyes. New avenues for development might open up and what you have already committed to could be discarded. 

Take a critical look at what you have created and try to find connections among the random thoughts. What makes sense? Strive to assemble some coherent themes and thoughts from what you have written about the experience and significance of the photographs. Keep thinking and writing. If you discover new and better ideas write them down. Don’t forget to use lines to separate the new and old ideas.

Begin organizing the thoughts into a story about the photographs. The goal of your story will be to lead the viewers up to the edge of the photograph. Then, the viewers can fall into the photographic experience you created. This is what you want to share with your viewers. Write this down. It does not have to be long, expressive or wonderful. What it has to be is complete. You can’t edit anything if it isn’t complete. Call it the first draft.

Let the first draft marinate for a week. You may then commence revisions to create drafts two through six. It is quite permissible to have days pass between drafts. Send draft six to a very good friend along with the photographs. This is a very important part of creating an Artist’s statement; selection of a person that can look at your photographs and your words and tell you honestly when you have missed the mark. It’s even better if they can tell you how far you have missed and why you missed the mark. You have reached nirvana when they can make suggestions to improve the statement.

What to do with this critique is important. When you get the critique back, read it. Think about it and let it age while your bruised ego gets better.

508 Writing the Artists Statement (Part 1 of 3)

Imaginary Landscape, San Jose, CA

We all have to write an artist's statement from time to time. Most photographers hate this part of the artistic process. We are visual artists, not writers, which is why we have cameras and communicate with images. I thought I might share how I approach this oft dreaded task.

Writing an Artist’s Statement is really a very straightforward task. I have written at least one for each of the photographic projects on my website. I generally follow a procedure in writing and here’s how I do it. Maybe this will help you. Here we go.

Open new document in word processing program. Open up an image viewer (I use Adobe Bridge) to look and think about the images you are writing about.

Start thinking about your photographs. Remember what you were thinking before, during and after making the photographs. How did you feel about making the photographs? What type of day was it? Reminisce about the experience you had making the photographs. Consider how your photographic experience fits into the larger part of your life, the world and where you made your photographs. In short, you need to generate a lot of ideas about your photographs. The open document is the place you record all these thoughts. Sentence fragments, words, phrases, whatever crosses your mind needs to be recorded. At this phase, you are brainstorming, generating creative ideas. Don’t judge or edit. Write it down.

Save and close the document and come back tomorrow. It is quite permissible to continue thinking about your photographs as you go about the rest of your life.

Repeat as required. Continue to remember what you were thinking before, during and after you made the photographs. Were any of these experiences relevant to the making of the photographs? Do you have a story about the making of the photographs? What about each photograph made you include it in your project? What is the connection among the images?

Quit after a page or two of random thoughts and ideas. Then ignore your writing for a week. Don’t worry, you’re just getting started!

507 Playing Your Best Eleven

Kitchen Stove, Cerro Gordo, CA

“I don’t play my eleven best. I play my best eleven.” – Knute Rockne

When you create a photographic project your photographs are a team, not a collection of your greatest hits. There is a time and place for a retrospective collection of your best work, but for the most part those exhibitions are usually for a late career or retired artist. If your goal is a project, then select images that work well together to support the premise of the project.

I have blogged earlier that the great photographs do not arrive by themselves. They come with friends; photographs that were made as part of that creative journey. All the photographs need to work together to create what you want to say to your audience.

You need to be able to distinguish between your best photographs and the best photographs for your exhibition. Selecting photographs and sequencing the photographs to work well together is an art form itself. It’s one of those difficult subjects that cannot be taught, but must be learned.

506 Hanging on to the Past

 

Plimsol Lines, Ferry Boat

I’m still suffering through the Curse of the Archives (See posts 492 and 500) and struggling with the following thought; “If my old photographs are so bad, why am I hanging on to them?” Those really ugly bad photographs are taking up storage space I could use for something else. Why haven’t these old photographs already met their demise in some potlatch? What makes these bad images so powerful they have yet to be dispatched to the great trash heap in the sky? Is their sole photographic use is as a bad example? Or am I hanging on to them because they are visual memories of an old man? I am only beginning to look for an answer to this question. Maybe this is just another way of postponing the eventual task of disposing of truly horrible photographs.

Brooks Jensen (of LensWork fame) posits that once he goes into the great ink maintenance tank in the sky, his children will sell all his photographs at an estate sale for fifty cents…a box. I have complete faith and confidence the estate sale of my photographs will be quite profitable because people will pay good money for the storage boxes or the frames holding my old photographs.

Did you notice that I did not mention anything about unused photographic equipment? It’s like none of us have any spare photo gear lying about the house, right? I’ll deal with that idea later.