Reflections on photography, art, beauty and the natural landscape.
The perennial adage directed at artists to find their own voice is reprised here by filmmaker Christopher Nolan:
You have to cross into this world of just pleasing yourself, just doing something because you want to do it. It was a very valuable lesson. The truth is you have to hang on to your own belief. At the end of the day, all you really have is your own belief, your own passion. You can't ignore the feedback. But you tell the story because you love it.
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Art that speaks to any of us always comes from a very particular place,
and then we find ourselves in it in some kind of way.
– Elizabeth Alexander
"A good photograph is knowing where to stand."
– Ansel Adams
In 1812 composer Ludwig van Beethoven received an admiring fan letter from a little girl and sent back this touching reply:
The true artist is not proud, he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal; and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.
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“To me, beauty appears when one feels deeply, and art is an act of total attention”
– photographer Dorothea Lange
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”
–– poet Wisława Szymborska
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“One doesn’t arrive — in words or in art — by necessarily knowing where one is going,”
–– artist Ann Hamilton
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An ongoing theme in this collection of musings is the proper role of the intellect, if there is one, in the creation of art. As a photographer who has relied more on instinct than intellect in choosing how and what to capture, I am typically unmoved by conceptual art that requires the viewer to engage intellectually with a piece.
Painter Agnes Martin shares this sentiment:
The great and fatal pitfall in the art field and in life is dependence on the intellect rather than inspiration. Dependence on intellect means a consideration of observed facts and deductions from observation as a guide in life. Dependence on inspiration means dependence on consciousness, a growing consciousness that develops from awareness of beauty and happiness.
To live and work by inspiration you have to stop thinking. You have to hold your mind still in order to hear inspiration clearly.
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I can't pretend to know exactly what photographer Nadav Kander intended by this statement but maybe that's why it's worth considering:
“It’s all about the unknown – that’s what I look for in pictures of the sea or in landscapes. I’m looking for what it feels like to close one’s eyes and not know.”
Author Zadie Smith's recent short fiction in THE NEW YORKER – Crazy They Call Me— is a brilliant peek inside the head of jazz singer Billie Holiday as she reflects on the creative impulse as she perceives it:
…the surprise you feel in yourself, the sense of being directed by God, when something in the modulation of your throat leaps up, like a kid reaching for a rising balloon, except most kids miss while you catch it—yes, you catch it almost without expecting to—landing on an incidental note, a perfect addition, one you never put in that phrase before, and never heard anyone else do, and yet you can hear at once that it is perfection. Perfection! It has the sound of something totally inevitable…
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