I read a quote recently that has gotten me thinking. Photographer, Keith Carter suggests that if you really want to create something special you need to
Go Beyond the Personal
into the realm of connection with everything and everyone.
This idea resonates for me and explains the kind of yearning I feel when I look at the photographs that I make that aren’t quite there yet (which is almost all of my photographs).
I think you go through stages in making art. In the first stages you get excited about the medium itself. It offers a very immediate kind of gratification. Here is what I see and here is a picture of it. Then it gets harder. Then you find somebody whose work excites you, such as Robert Frank, and it opens up new doors and so you replicate them or you do work that is influenced by them. I think all of that is very, very useful in terms of your own growth. Because if you have anything at all, you will only do that for a while, and then you use what you have learned and you try to turn it into your own voice. That is where things really get hard. If you can make that leap, then you start making personal work. Personal work is where most people stop. Most people stop when it gets personal. I will tell you my greatest secret, and I probably shouldn’t, but I will tell you anyway. Here is what I think and feel and I hope it is useful to you. If you really want to do something special, if you want to make poetry, and granted most people don’t, but if you do, you have to go beyond what is merely personal. You have to reach a level in the human psyche where we are all the same. That is the real journey.
― Keith Carter
Becoming a photographer (or any other kind of artist) is a journey. And as Keith Carter suggests, at first simply seeing something and creating a photograph of it is exciting. Over time you grow and change and learn new things. And you copy the work of others whom you admire. And then (this is the stage I feel I am in now) you begin to express your personal voice in your work. It’s as if you are saying, “This is how I see the world.”
But to move beyond the personal to the universal, this is a leap I’ve not yet made. I love that there is always a far horizon to look to in my journey as a photographer and a human being.
Wabi-sabi world
Yesterday I went for a walk in the neighborhood looking to express how this season of the year reminds me of the concept of wabi-sabi (a Japanese aesthetic that derives from the idea that everything is imperfect and transient). I gave my photo class students the assignment to express wabi-sabi in their photographs this week so I thought that I should once again revisit this beautiful idea that expresses my view of this perfectly imperfect world we live in.
To Taoism that which is absolutely still or absolutely perfect is absolutely dead, for without the possibility of growth and change there can be no Tao. In reality there is nothing in the universe which is completely perfect or completely still; it is only in the minds of men that such concepts exist.”
―
I have been enjoying this uncharacteristically mild December weather and even enjoying the shortening days this week. Because of the short daylight I can photograph a sunrise at 7:30 AM and find golden hour at 3:00 PM, making almost no effort to take advantage of the light on sunny and partly cloudy days.
Sunrise Wednesday morning
I don’t just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for those little askew moments — kind of like what makes up our lives – those slightly awkward, lovely moments.
– Keith Carter
May you walk in beauty.
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