Postcards from the Creative Journey

514 The Problem of Progress (Part I)

 

About seventeen years ago I created a folio of my fifty best photographs and sent it out on a CD to fifty photographic friends. I called it The Fifty Project. It’s still on my web site and suffers from being developed in the internet Jurassic age.

In the not too distant future, I shall pass another photographic milestone, being able to say that I have been photographing for fifty years. Why not create another “Fifty Project,” celebrating fifty years of photography? Brett Weston and many others published books chronicling their fifty years of photography. With sufficient temerity I do believe that I should join the Fifty Years of Photography Book Club.

Well, as I think about this, I think I have a bigger problem than, say, Brett Weston. (Acknowledging I am nowhere near the photographer Brett Weston was.) I would posit that photography for Brett changed very little from 1925 to 1975 whereas photography has changed quite a bit since 1972 when I first started developing and printing my own photographs.

Please come back next week, and we’ll talk some more about the problems of progress.

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This photograph from the Fifty Project was made in 1974 at a friend’s house in South Bend, Indiana. The house was one of those grand turn of the century houses subdivided into three or four apartments that seem to attract graduate students. Most people have a nice sense of design and it’s up to the photographer to put their camera in the right place and really work the edges to complete the composition.

In terms of progress, there is a subtle change in my blog beginning today. The image caption will be moved to the end of the blog post. The re-design of my website will include links to the last five blog on the landing page. The web site widget reads first words written on the blog and reading a caption without seeing a photograph doesn't make much sense. Moving the caption (and a little story about the photograph) to the end of the blog anticipates the redesign of my website. 

513 A Thought on Longevity

Church detail, Hart Square

I’m working on a project incorporating both vintage photographs and images scanned twenty five years ago. There is something wonderful about holding a photograph that is one hundred years old. The prints that are coming close to their centennial are still viable and yet the scanned images from twenty years ago aren’t useful for this project because the scanned files are sized at 500 x 800 pixels at 72 dpi.

I find it odd the much older print is still useful to me in this project. We are so proud of our modern technology, the failure of the more recent technology is kind of ironic. The scanned images were done in the early days of digital processing and suffered from (digitally) primitive processes.  The quality of digital equipment twenty five years ago and the relative expense of digital storage combined to produce a product that is of not much use today. I photographed the old print with my camera and got a very sharp 14Mb RAW file to process. It's much better that a scan of the same subject. 

I think the lesson in longevity is choosing the medium for long term storage. In the past, there were no choices. It was a film negative and a silver gelatin print. The argument for longevity consisted of how many fixing baths, toner and archival washing you had to go through to make sure your print survived for multiple centuries. Looking back at many of my archivally processed prints I wondered why I spent all that trouble to preserve some really poor photographs. 

Today, backward compatibility is technical term that will allow your project saved in version 2.0 software to be opened in version 10.2 of the same software. As I've discovered with the scanned images backward compatibility doesn't necessarily mean utility for future use. 

 

512 Common Things

Wheelwrights Shop, Hart Square

“Hopper took something that was common and made it look uncommon.” These few words from a short film about artist Edward Hopper say so much about what makes great art. I just love it when a complex idea can be distilled into its essence and expressed in just a few words.

The quest is how to make the common uncommon. I would suggest this quest can be accomplished by constant long, examination of the common subject under many different conditions. Patience is a virtue and being patient around a subject spending time observing, waiting, remembering previous observations, synthesizing visual memories and generally developing a visual relationship with what intrigues you. Continuing to "work" a subject results in your understanding of the subject, its character and provides you with a better understanding of how to photograph your subject. 

How do I know this is true? Edward Weston made forty four different photographs of peppers. That he kept trying after Pepper #30 means he wanted to keep trying, working, perfecting his method of photographing peppers. You don’t know you have reached your goal until you go past the goal and look back and see you have arrived.

People don’t spend time looking at the common thing. That’s why there are so few good photographs of common things. Most photographers do not stop and take the time to visually fall in love with the common things around us.

511 Did You Need a Name for that Project?

Knitting, Hart Square

You created photographs, processed them, edited them spent three weeks sweating out the artists statement (you’ve read the last three weeks of blog posts haven’t you?) and the only thing holding you up is what you are going to call your project. You created a project name, you just don’t know it. Go back and read the statement you’ve spent weeks working on. The title of your project is a phrase hidden in your artist’s statement. All you have to do is find the three or four words that are the very essence of the project. Look through everything because the right words may have been edited out of the final statement, or be hinted at in some of the words or phrases you didn't use in writing your statement.

Once you figure out that the name of the project is in your artist’s statement, then people will think you are clever to have created a project where the title, the statement and the photographs are all working together. The only thing it took was a lot of hard work on your part. 

510 Writing the Artists Statement (Part 3 of 3)

Pixelated Landscape, San Jose, CA

Pay attention to the critique. Read the comments and figure out how to edit your writing so it makes sense. If you have to rewrite everything because there is no connection between your photographs and your writing accept the critique. You rewrite; every word if necessary. It’s part of the process of creating the statement. Failure and rejection are an important  part of creating art.

With these suggestions you will have to edit, revise, cut, add, clarify or maybe even start all over again. My editing process has its own hierarchy. At first, I edit paragraphs, then I edit sentences. When I get down to the point where I am sweating over words, I know I am nearly ready.

When you think it’s ready, let the document rest for a bit. After the statement has rested, go over it one more time and re-submit your version of the final document to your friend for review. That last cycle is to cover any errors that make have crept into the last revision.

Once you get the statement back, proofread. Do not rely on software for this task. I had a funny/embarrassing experience once and learned my lesson. After the proofreading, it’s ready to be included in your project.

That’s all there is to it, he says with a sly grin. Didn’t say it would be easy, didn’t say it would be quick, but this is generally the route my statement writing takes. You might try this path and make it fit your own process.

Post Script

Usually I have to struggle with words to get a statement to make sense with the selected images. Sometimes, your statement can be written in fifteen minutes if your thoughts, words and images come together quickly. It’s only happened to me one time. The project is called A Gift of Light. No one was more surprised than me to have the whole project (start to finish, pictures and text) completed in about an hour.