Category: Nature

I've been personally working in the gallery for over a year now and one unexpected pleasure is chatting with gallery visitors about their lives and learning of all the good things going on that never make the news. 

Though these personal anecdotes may not be "newsworthy" by most standards, I've found they provide a welcome antidote to the barrage of negative stories we learn about every day — the ones that start to make us believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Among some of the stories people have shared: sponsoring a young persons college education, completing work on the 60th house in the area built by Habitat For Humanity and organizing an event to raise money for those who have met some setbacks.  Not to mention the steady stream of rescue dogs that find love from a caring household.

In that vein, here is a link to a mashup of security camera videos that have captured little vignettes of people demonstrating their better selves worldwide – I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Happy New Year.

My own experience lends credence to this quote I recently came across:

    Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working."

                                                Pablo Picasso

I came across this interesting perspective on creativity by filmaker Jim Jarmusch:

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

I recently came across an interview with Tim Ferris, author of The 4-hour Work Week — here's a telling excerpt:

You're known for your grassroots marketing style. Do artists today have a responsibility to market themselves?

It's 100% their responsibility. If you want to be a tremendous artist, and then expect people to beat a path to your door, you can try that. The fact of the matter is, it's not going to happen unless you meet someone who makes that happen.

So you can make it accidental or you can grease the wheels of the universe and try to encourage those things to happen. In that case, guess what? You're marketing. When people think marketing, they think of a cheesy sales guy. Marketing is knowing exactly who your customers are, and trying to get your product, your art to them. If you are creating art for yourself, well great, go live in a cave and do it. But if you're doing it commercially and you have bills to pay, it's not selling out to get your work to the people who most appreciate it.

from an interview on 99u

A column in the NY TIMES caught my eye last week.  Silas House, a writer, describes an encounter with another writer at a workshop and I thought his conclusion could be applied to photography, or any creative endeavor:
 

I was a young, naïve, foolish writer who was searching for my way. I swallowed hard and asked [ James Still, a novelist and poet] if he had any advice on how to be a better writer. He didn’t answer for a long minute, gazing off at the hills as if ignoring me.

But then he spoke, and I realized that he had taken that moment for quiet thought. “Discover something new every day."

This way of being must be something that we have to turn off instead of actively turn on. It must be the way we live our lives.

Came across a thoughtful Op-Ed piece in the NY TIMES by Bill Hayes a short time ago that echoes one of the themes of this blog: pay attention.  It contrasts being dead — you either are or you aren't — with being alive, which is more nuanced:

After all, there are many ways to die — peacefully, violently, suddenly, slowly, happily, unhappily, too soon. But to be dead — one either is or isn’t.

The same cannot be said of aliveness, of which there are countless degrees. One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause — to memorize moments of the everyday.

I came across an article in FORBES by Jonathan Keats describing the work and outlook of photographer Joel Sternfeld, best known for his pioneering color photography back in the 70's:

 Sternfeld recognizes the passive-aggressive coerciveness of pictures, and enlists their manipulative power. “You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo," Sternfeld observes. "No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.”

Yet… we remain all too confident about our unmediated vision, which is also inherently selective, limited by when and where we’re looking. Sternfeld’s pictures remind us that, like a camera, our eyes are essentially passive. Like photography, observation is an act of authorship.

Earlier this year I gave a presentation to a group of photographers and observed that the only variables a photographer has at his disposal is the scene before him and the camera's frame.  So it was gratifying to read that noted street photographer Garry Winogrand drew the same conclusion when he was shooting back in the 70's:

“Putting four edges around a collection of information or
facts transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed, it’s
something else…a new world is created”. 

Don't mean to be profane, but this is literally the message I came across in this excellent and provocative video of designer Jonathan Adler telling the story of his creative success (thanks 99u!)

In a nutshell, his advice — you've no doubt heard it before – is to "follow your heart" — though he has a much more colorful and entertaining way of presenting that notion.

I thought this recent post by Seth Godin was spot-on:

In the face of billions of dollars of destruction, of the loss of life, of families distrupted, it's easy to wonder what we were so hung up on just a few days ago. Many just went face to face with an epic natural disaster, and millions are still recovering. Writer's block or a delayed shipment or an unreturned phone call seem sort of trivial now.

We're good at creating drama, at avoiding emotional labor and most of all, at thinking small. Maybe we don't need another meeting, a longer coffee break or another hour whittling away at our stuckness.

There's never been a better opportunity to step up and make an impact, while we've got the chance. This generation, this decade, right now, there are more opportunities to connect and do art than ever before. Maybe even today.

It's pretty easy to decide to roll with the punches, to look at the enormity of natural disaster and choose to hunker down and do less. It's more important than ever, I think, to persist and make a dent in the universe instead.

We've all been offered access to so many tools, so many valuable connections, so many committed people. What an opportunity.