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.

Came across a piece in the NY TIMES that profiled biologist David Haskell and his views on the natural world, including his take on the beauty of biology:

“You can live a perfectly happy life never having heard of Shakespeare,” he says, “but your life is in some ways a little diminished, because there’s such beauty there."

“And I think the same is true of nature. Much of it is useless to us, and that’s O.K. It’s not true that every species that goes extinct is like another rivet off the plane and the plane’s going to crash. We lost the passenger pigeon and the U.S. economy did not tank. But we lost the passenger pigeon and we lost some of this remarkable music made out of atoms and DNA.”

Came across this great short video clip of quirky artist and personal hero of mine, Maira Kalman, speaking about creativity (thanks Swiss-Miss!)

"What is the difference between thinking and feeling?" she asks.  "Whenever I think too much I say: ' Stop thinking.. this will end badly.' "

She goes on to describe how she goes for walks to allow her brain to empty.  "Wonderful things happen when you're brain is empty."

She concludes with a spot-on observation that certainly mirrors my experience as a photographer and, I'm guessing, anyone in a creative field:

"A lot of my work is waiting for the unexpected and to be surprised."

Just came across this provocative excerpt on swiss-miss from an interview with sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury:

INTERVIEWER: How important has your sense of optimism been to your career?

BRADBURY: I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in
optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of
your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find
out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the
top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the
echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish
meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother and when I
finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful.
And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference?

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you
lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t
matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week
you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you
look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.

Theres a remarkable story on NPR about a darkroom technician in Indiana who salvages some color slides that are headed for the trash and subsequently discovers the work of one Charles Cushman, an early adopter of the brand new technology of color photography.

Cushman documents, almost obsessively, his travels around the country, pointing his camera at everything — from the fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge to inner city families to pastoral scenes and everything in between.

Though there is apparently not much of a record of what motivated Cushman, except for the images themselves, the narrator suggests that Cushman was using photography to uncover beauty and bring meaning and order to an otherwise chaotic world:

I think the camera was a way of putting a frame around that, codifying it — just being able to deal with it in some way that made it manageable….a lot of times I think that's what this life is about — being able to come to terms with the things you find so overwhelmingly beautiful.

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.  I'm frightened of the old ones"

–– JOHN CAGE