Art as Meaning Making

Quotes of the day:

“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” – Ansel Adams

“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.” ― Robert Frank 

“At least twice a week, I pause in the rush of work and have a meeting with myself. (If I were part of a team, I’d call a team meeting.) I ask myself, again, of the project: “What is this damn thing about?” Keep refining your understanding of the theme; keep narrowing it down.” — Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

O Beautiful for Spacious Skies

Did I mention that I made over 15,000 photographs while I was on my Hawaii walk-about this winter? Yup, that’s right—15,000!

In addition to choosing a set of photos for a planned May show, I’m also trying to create a video slide show that creates a sense of the sacred that emerged for me while making the photographs. I have ideas and words that express the central theme, but nothing quite expresses it the way I want it to. Art as meaning making has proven a challenge for me.

Getting rid of the really bad photos was easy. Skipping over the nice, but nothing special photos was almost as easy. But selecting the best of the best and making meaning from them all has so far been impossible for me.

I’ve gone through endless iterations and organizations of the photos, separating into all sorts of piles based upon differing theme ideas or subject.

I’ve ordered and re-ordered the video slide show, added photos, taken photos away and thrown everything out and started all over again more times than I can remember.

I have concluded that I am living inside the artistic gap between what I want my work to mean and what it really does. I am reminded of Ira Glass’ wonderful quote:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

So, all I can do is continue to do the work and put it out there and stop judging and second guessing myself.

Yesterday, I created a gallery of what I consider to be the best images from my trip. I got the number of images down to 138 (a considerable reduction from the original 15,000). No words that express what these photos mean to me have emerged, but that too will come (I hope).

Now my job is to keep asking, “What is this thing about?” and keep narrowing and narrowing until I have a set of 25-30 images.

Here is the gallery of my best images from the trip (a couple of the images were taken on the way to Hawaii but all the rest were taken on the Big Island of Hawaii). Let me know what you think and whether you have particular favorites.

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