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Collectors of our landscape photographs often inquire about the switch we made to filmmaking.  It was in large part due to reaching a state of satisfaction with the portfolio of images we had amassed after two decades – the itch had been scratched.

Additionally, the chance to explore a wider palette of captured experience in filmmaking was tempting. In fact, the films of Terence Malick – especially "Days of Heaven" – had always seemed to reflect the essence of what we were trying to do with photographs.  Not surprisingly, Malick himself arrived at filmmaking when he found that studying and writing about philosophy was unfulfilling.

In a video essay about Malick's films, the narrator quotes Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell regarding the distinction:

Film can perceive the world for us without our meddling selves getting in the way. It can train us to pay attention to it in all its sensory details… its sounds… its textures, whereas a written account can only describe, film can reproduce.

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In his journal, artist Keith Haring described his compunction to compare himself and his work to other artists along with fear of the unknown that comes with following ones own path:

I guess it’s because I’m afraid. Afraid I’m wrong. And I guess I’m afraid I’m wrong, because I constantly relate myself to other people, other experiences, other ideas. I should be looking at both in perspective, not comparing. I relate my life to an idea or an example that is some entirely different life. I should be relating it to my life only in the sense that each has good and bad facets. Each is separate. The only way the other attained enough merit, making it worthy of my admiration, or long to copy it is by taking chances, taking it in its own way. It has grown with different situations and has discovered different heights of happiness and equal sorrows. If I always seek to pattern my life after another, mine is being wasted re-doing things for my own empty acceptance. But, if I live my life my way and only let the other [artists] influence me as a reference, a starting point, I can build an even higher awareness instead of staying dormant… I only wish that I could have more confidence and try to forget all my silly preconceptions, misconceptions, and just live. Just live. Just. Live. Just live till I die.

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Narratives can make us understand.
Photographs do something else:
they haunt us.

                         – Susan Sontag

 

 

Human creativity is nature manifest in us.

                                                                                        –– Ethan Hawke

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An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation.

                                                                                                                - Lewis Hyde

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Don’t try and find a picture. Find a place you like and find the picture in that.

                                                                                                                         ––  Ivon Hitchens

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There's a story the late author Tom Wolfe told about his first magazine article, for Esquire magazine.  The magazine had flown the young writer to LA to report on the car culture there, putting him up in a luxury hotel and sparing no expense, including paying a photographer $10,000 to document the scene even before seeing the copy. 

At the end of a week, Wolfe sat down to write and found himself unable to even begin.  After procrastinating most of an evening, he called editor Byron Dobell to tell him he's unable to finish the piece.  Dobell instructs Wolfe to just type up his notes then and send them along – he'll get another writer to do it.

Freed of the burdens of grammar and style, a newly energized and unencumbered Wolfe begins: "Dear Byron", speed types 49 pages of notes randomly punctuated, finishes at 4 am and sends off the mess of papers before going to bed.

When he calls Byron to see how he made out, Byron tells him he loved what Wolfe sent and, after removing "Dear Byron", ran the piece as submitted, punctuation and all.  And so was born Gonzo Journalism and a career.

Which brings us to the take-home point, succinctly summarized here by sci-fi author Ray Bradbury and understood at some level by creatives everywhere:

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

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Never work for other people at what you do.

Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest it in some way you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society.

And I think it's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people's expectations. I think they generally produce their worst work when they do that.

The other thing I would say is that if you feel safe in the area that you're working in you're not working in the right area.

Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being and go a little bit out of your depth and when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about at the right place to do something exciting.

                                                                                                                                –– David Bowie

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Came across this tweet that may very well express the motivation of creatives generally –– it certainly describes my decades-long journey of photographic discovery:

 

Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.

                                                                                                        - Lucille Clifton

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In a recent issue of THE NEW YORKER art critic Peter Schjeldahl explores the work of painter Edward Hopper, describing him as "the visual bard of American solitude," and observing that "once you've seen a Hopper, it stays seen, lodged in your mind's eye." 

Hopper, describing his style, explained: “I have tried to present my sensations in what is the most congenial and impressive form possible to me.”

Exasperated by questions of what his works meant, he squelched one interviewer by exclaiming, “I’m after ME.”

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