Category: Uncategorized

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers. 

                                                                               –– James Baldwin

[thanks JK Glei]

Certainly in photography, and no doubt in many other creative fields as well, serendipity — the chance encounter of a telling result — can play an important role. For that to happen, though, the photographer (or artist) must be open to "discovering" something that one cannot actually search for.

An interesting article in the NY TIMES talks about the relevance of serendipity to science, though the path is really the same for any creative enterprise:

As people dredge the unknown, they are engaging in a highly creative act. What an inventor “finds” is always an expression of him- or herself… One survey of patent holders found that an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process. Thousands of survey respondents reported that their idea evolved when they were working on an unrelated project — and often when they weren’t even trying to invent anything.

[NY TIMES]

Musician and author Patti Smith describes, in her book "Just Kids", the genesis of the creative impulse when she was just a child:

When I was very young, my mother took me for walks in Humboldt Park, along the edge of the Prairie River. I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates, of an old boathouse, a circular band shell, an arched stone bridge. The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle. A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage.

Swan, my mother said, sensing my excitement. It pattered the bright water, flapping its great wings, and lifted into the sky.

The word alone hardly attested to its magnificence nor conveyed the emotion it produced. The sight of it generated an urge I had no words for, a desire to speak of the swan, to say something of its whiteness, the explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings. 

[ thanks BP]

For all of us, but especially the artist or those who seek a creative avocation, there is no more difficult task than to be aware of, listen to and act upon that subtle inner voice that nudges us towards the path we are destined for and which no one before us has explored in precisely the way we are able.  I came across a passage from Nietzsche echoing this sentiment:

No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!

[thanks, BP]

“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.”

                                                                                                –– Marc Chagall

Not entirely sure, but I think this helps explain the attraction we have (I have) to photography — as a way of "stopping time" and, in so doing, not only keeping it from advancing into the future but also allowing us to more closely examine the precious captured moment…

“Is there anything we know more intimately than the fleetingness of time, the transience of each and every moment?” 

                                                                                                                             —— Rebecca Goldstein

Another telling and poetic excerpt from the work of author Annie Dillard:

This, then is the extravagant landscape of the world, given, given with pizzazz, given in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over.

[Pilgrim at Tinker Creek]

Author Annie Dillard's observation about living in the present is equally descriptive of the artist's ideal state of mind when creating or performing:

What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.

[ from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek]

Advice worth heeding, literally as well as metaphorically:

…take the path of natural light. Embrace the idea that the conditions will never be ideal, which of course makes them always ideal. Because the thing about natural light is that whatever it is, is.

                                                                                                                                –– Seth Godin

This sentiment, this magnetic pull towards discovery, is true of any creative endeavor:

Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.

                                                                                                                           –– Stefan Zweig

[thanks, Goodreads]