Oh noes! Not another variation of Zimmerman's song! Not another post about how much this coronabollocks sucks! Not another whinge about how this is impacting someone's creativity. Well, it's not.
Another week, another extension of pandemic restrictions. It's been months since I've done any sort of serious work. Even in Paris my shooting was desultory as I was in tourist mode. I really don't feel like I should be out shooting as it's hardly an essential activity in any way. Unless we get this beast under control a lot of things will come crashing down, like the airline industry where my good lady wife works.
This post is about three things: Creativity blocks, keeping busy in quarantine and the results of the latter.
Creativity Blocks and How We Mess With Our Own Mind
Thomas Heaton, a young landscape photographer out of England posted on
YouTube about how the coronabollocks has drained his desire to get out of bed and get out and shoot. Truth be told, that sounds more like incipient depression to me but there you go.
Heaton is a very talented photographer and wears his heart on his sleeve. His images are technical tours de force; lacking a bit of emotion sometimes (for me) but à chacun son goût . Overall I really like his oeuvre.
I get it Thomas. You make your living from this and I feel for you. I had times like this crafting software. There would be days when I could barely put hand to keyboard, all the while the PM (usually me) clamouring for code.
Two things are happening here. Isolation due to lurgi and a lack of desire.
Isolation due to Lurgi? Nothing we can do about that. Creatives sometimes need interaction although I work alone and don't really like photographers' get-togethers all that much: photowalks are not my thing but going to galleries are.
For the absolute lack of desire to get up and shake it? It's a case of writers/artist/photographers/creative block and lots of sort-of-helpful lists are out there on how to deal with it.
Personally? For photography? I go do something else: build something in the shop, read, walk around without a camera just seeing. The latter frees me from having to schlep gear around and I can just practice seeing things differently, getting ideas and, if I do see something, a modern cellphone camera that can capture DNG (like my iPhone and Camera645Pro -- shameless plug) well Bob's your auntie. For writing? See above but carry a small notebook and write down phrases that come into my head.
In both cases those quick sketches using the mind, a cellphone or a notebook get tossed into a mental stew and later, sometimes months later, as I leaf through them something leaps out and grabs me: a phrase, a bon mot, a partial image. Then, oh and then, the motivation often is such that I can't contain the desire to (figuratively) climb every mountain and ford every stream. The block vanishes and you've got your mojo back.
There are some funny habits that we ape-descendant lifeforms have: categorizing ourselves, overthinking, and looking for the (creative) endorphin rush. These bury our creative juices in a steaming pile of existential muck.
Of the three, categorizing ourselves is probably the biggest block to any creative endeavour. When you're in a creative funk hanging on to "I'm a street tog", "I'm a landscape photographer", "I'm a travel photographer" gets in the way of blowing that funk away. Definitions like that have so much baggage associated with them that they get in the way of any sort of creativity as they bind you into a preset visual language. Yuck.
The Derbyshire Police handing out tickets for driving out of town to a deserted place to walk and photograph? There's an urban landscape to photograph closer to home. Margaret Bourke-White did an excellent job of photographing the urban landscape. Her images of Cleveland's steel industry show an urban landscape write large and stand up to anything Ansell Adams did.
No one on the streets? Buildings are on the streets. Street photography, unfortunately, seems to mandate a human presence. What then are buildings? Are they not indicative of a human presence? Lee Friedlander's streetscapes are every bit as compelling as those done by any street photographer.
Not to belabour things but consider Picasso. How do YOU categorize him? Guernica? Abstract Portraits? Did you know he designed tiles? Made pottery? For frogs snacks! Don't limit yourselves. Try a different genre at the very least!
I'll only mention the other two in passing. Overthinking is continually analysing something, going around and around and never getting resolution. In hockey I'd see it when a prolific goal scorer went into a slump. Watching him on the ice I'd see him trying to think out the play rather than just reacting. We'd call it "holding the stick too tight". Just go out and put pucks on the net we'd tell him; don't go for the highlight reel play. Same with photography. Travel light, shoot, work quickly, react. Not every shot is going to go in the net, nor will every photograph go into the portfolio but it will end up in your sketch book -- Tom Thompson's oil sketches are worth as much as his paintings. But if you don't make that shot, there's no way it'll happen.
Endorphin Rush? Yeah, I get it. Nothing more exciting or thrilling when that whatever it is goes BONG in your chest and you know that what you're working on is the money shot. We keep wanting to duplicate that feeling and when it doesn't happen you start to jones pushing yourself harder and hard and beating yourself up when you can't get that rush. That's an addictive behaviour. Dunno how you stop that but I always remind myself that a bad day's shooting is always better than sitting in a cubicle.
Lurgi and How to Deal With It
Me? I read. Everything from spy novels to history to philosophy to art. I look at other photographers' work and try to learn from them, deconstruct them. There's nothing more satisfying than finally being able to say: "I saw what you did there!"
I've read "The Bloodlands", all of Chandler's Marlowe mysteries, "SevenEves", David Martin's "Road to Seeing", "Margaret Bourke-White" and so on.
I also rummage through my back collection looking at images that I may have discarded or forgotten about or try out some different processing techniques on one that I've worked on before. Heck, given the state of my brain, sometimes all three at once.
If you're serious about abiding by the "don't go out unless you really need to" dictum to do your part in flattening the curve then that's about all you can do and still keep photographically sane.
Other than write drivel, of course.
Lost Project Found
So I was rummaging through the catalog the other daaay...
And found a number of images that I had started working on but stopped for one reason or another. These things happen. Not sure why these got abandoned but so many things happen around here that images sometimes get put to one side.
Back in the day on 11th St SE there was the Blackfoot Farmers' Market. It was a ramshackle affair and only open during the summer. With two by four and plywood booths the vendors it was kinda a sketchy affair. It had a petting zoo with some goats I seem to recall. My wife and I visited once and wasn't even up to the standard of a roadside fruit stand in the Okanagan; overpriced produce, sketchily wrapped food, you know the drill.
Can't recall how many years ago that it finally packed up but I seem to recall newspaper articles about the stall holders fighting amongst themselves and with the whatever governance was in place. Over time it became overgrown and began to decay. Some homeless moved and were rousted regularly and as usual, the taggers left their mark as well.
These images show what was left almost 4 years ago. Two years ago they came in with heavy equipment and removed all that was left and now it stores bark mulch in rows between the trees.
I didn't do a lot of post-processing other than cropping and some minor exposure adjustments in Lightroom. The light was magic that March morning and these pretty well match the OOC jpegs. The colours where so vibrant that I didn't even try to do and BW processing.
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Stay safe, wear a mask, get vaxed as soon as you can.
