Postcards from the Creative Journey

576 Ya Just Never Know

Some projects just never quit and sometimes it is a struggle just to keep up with them. My Academy Street project just keeps chugging along. The hero image for the Change of Pace folio is the Pasmore House at 307 Academy Street. It was distinguished by two huge oak trees in the front yard. About a year ago a storm felled one of the trees in the front yard. After the mess was cleared up the owners left a fifteen foot tall stump. I thought that change in the look of a house on Academy Street was memorable and a worthy addition to my project but, at that time I was busy working on After the Memories project and never got around to photographing that change on Academy Street.

A few weeks ago I drove down Academy Street and the fifteen foot stump is now a fifteen foot tall wood sculpture created by a chainsaw wielding sculptor. I have the “A” photo and the “C” photo, but dang it if I didn’t get the “B” photo that would have been the key to a triptych.

Never put off that photo opportunity.

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Academy Street continues to call to me as a subject for folios. After completing the After the Memories Project, more historical and vintage photographs surface and I just have to incorporate them into the existing project. It's as if this project is a living thing that continues to need to be fed and cared for. I guess it is a "Pet Project."

The changes to the area were significant. For some reason, the City Planners thought on street parking was important. Now we can clearly see our parked automobiles rather than the interesting architecture of a historic street. Not a good thing. But, on the plus side, the Pasmore House is now the site of a craft brewery - with a really cool sculpture in the front yard. 

575 An Important Distinction

Sometimes you don't realize a significant change you made is significant unless someone else tells you about it. I was reading the other day where a museum curator made a distinction between image and photograph. The difference is that photograph implies a physical artifact while the use of image implies a virtual entity.

I like this distinction because it does draw a distinction between two important ways we have to see photographs; as physical artifacts or as pixels on a screen.

In looking back over my past blog posts I find that I have pretty much made this transition to the virtual world and referring to the photographs as images. I create stories combining images and words to share my thoughts with the world. The primary vehicle for this are my folios hosted on my website. Producing an actual artifact is an exception rather than the rule. Photography has made almost a complete reversal going from physical artifacts to virtual images.

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The Fisherman's Bastion in Budapest. I would have liked an opportunity to photograph this fabulous structure overlooking Budapest but the location was closed to the public because it was being used as a movie set. 

574 One Foot in the Past

Gallery shows are wonderful, a lot of work and tough to come by. The competition for gallery space is intense and the reward is fleeting and very often not financially rewarding. Yet, we still pursue this as a venue to display our art. There is prestige and honor to have our works shown in a gallery.

Yet, I see gallery shows as a thing of the past. We just don’t go out to galleries and museums as much as in the past. It is so much more convenient to see photographic images just about any time we want by visiting a website (or a blog). We are not required to go to a certain place at a specified time to see photographs. We can do so from the comfort and convenience of wherever we have our smartphone, tablet or computer. We see more photographs online than in galleries or museums by a factor of, what, a Billion or so? With the internet and a smartphone, we don’t have to make a special trip to see photographs. Photographic images are with us all the time, just a click or so away.

Instagram, Facebook and whatever the latest image sharing site is the latest rage are where photographs are going to be seen in the future. We will still have museums, but my guess is that museums will have photographs as more of a curiosity or historical artifact than anything else.

The transition from physical to virtual world should be a strategic effort for photographers. Participating in the virtual world is more effective in showing work to more people, more times and done with less work than having a gallery show.

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The Bishop and the Bicycle in Wurzburg, Germany. More street photography featuring bicycles in Europe. 

573 How far do you have to go to fulfill your vision?

I attended a photo gallery talk a few months ago and the photographer’s description of the difficulties encountered in making the photographs along with the complex technical processing almost made my head hurt.

The photographs were very, very good, the stories were great and the cleverness and technical prowess to complete the images was impressive. I went away with mixed feelings; impressed with the effort to make the images and the workflow to create the prints, (and the prints were both large and spectacular) but was wondering if the effort would be appreciated by people that weren't privy to the entire photographic process.

It struck me that “civilians” (that is, non-photographers) would only see the image and not be aware of the incredible effort that went into creating the images.

It’s good to remember that the audience is looking at the image, not the effort you put into making the image. The effort put into making the artwork is not relevant to most of the people viewing your image. The success of the image is based on the audience's response to the image, not to the effort taken to create the artwork. 

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Bratislava Castle Passageway. There was not much there, there, but when there's some nice light and shadows there is always enough to make a photograph. 

572 No, Wait. Photograph First, Then Write.

Here’s another thought on dealing with an artist statement. I think that most photographers will make their images first and then write that artist statement. I am guilty of that method of work, because I am a photographer first and writing is a struggle I postpone and hope to minimize.

Rather than spend a lot of time writing a long artist statement at the beginning of your project (as I suggested last week), spread your artist statement throughout your project. When I first started combining words and pictures I had lots of words at the beginning and the end of the project. Creating long artist statements really slowed down the completion of many projects. I had the photographs edited, sequenced and ready to publish, but was stuck because those pesky words just wouldn't arrange themselves as well as the photographs did.

Many times I started out writing statements, creating a sentence or two and found I wrote myself into a corner. I did not despair, I drew a line under the unusable text and tried again. I can't remember who told me, but the advice was never delete anything you write. Why? Because you never know when or if you might find what was rejected on this project might be wonderful in some other project. So, I don't delete. I just stop and move on. 

In reviewing all these dead end efforts it dawned on me that all these partially finished statements applied to a particular photograph or two. At that point I decided to combine these mini-statements with their images on one page. This change made the design of the folios a little bit more complex, but it was much easier to write that pesky artist statement in small chunks and that eliminated the hurdle of creating a long artist statement.

Here are two examples of the "distributed artist statement" approach; Adaptations and The Inevitability of Numbers. 

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Another Church in Vienna. It was abandoned. Closed, locked, fenced off and not accessible. All signage was removed from the premises. I loved the way it looked and spent about an hour photographing the exterior from beyond a chain link fence surrounding the parish grounds. A few months after I got home I started exploring Google maps and found out I  photographed the Church of St. Francis of Assisi.