March 2015

It’s one thing to make a picture of what a person looks like, it’s another thing to make a portrait of who they are. Paul Caponigro

Annie Leibovitz on shooting portraits...

When I'm taking someone's photo I never set anyone at ease. I always thought it was their problem. Either they were at ease or they weren't. That was part of what was interesting about a picture. Setting people at ease is not part of what I do. The question assumes that one is looking for a "nice" picture, but a good portrait photographer is looking for something else.

It might be a nice picture and it might not. I know, however, that I do set people at ease because
I'm very direct. I'm there simply to take the picture and that's it.

Most people don't like having their picture taken. It's a stressful, self-confrontational moment. Some people are better at it than others. I work best with people who can project themselves, but many people can't do that. Or they don't want to. They don't feel good about themselves. Or they feel too good about themselves. I'm not very accomplished at talking to people, and I certainly can't talk to people and take pictures at the same time.

Richard Avedon seduced his subjects with conversation. The classic anecdote about Avedon getting what he wanted from a sitter is the one about him going to photograph the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. They were great animal lovers. They doted on their pugs. Avedon set up the portrait, talking all the while, and just before he took the picture he told them a story, completely untrue, about how on the way to the sitting his taxi had run over a little dog. That broke their composure. He got the famous portrait of them looking anguished.

Maybe if I live another fifty years I could do that. You have to admire it, though. I think the only form of seduction I'm capable of is the assurance that I'm a good photographer and that we're going to do something interesting. I've never asked anyone to do something that didn't seem right for them. And I don't ask them to do something for no reason.

It's a collaboration. Especially if you're working with an entertainer, an actor or a comedian. I ever make people do anything. But I'm the photographer. It's a photo session. A lot of it is about play. I'm interested in getting something unpredictable, something you don't normally see. Even so, when the picture starts to happen, it's often a surprise.

At Work
Annie Leibovitz

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If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.
Annie Leibovitz

Listen to the work:

Removing Editors.

In every project, whether it is personal or commercial, there are clients, bosses, curators, teachers, and colleagues, all of whom will tell you their opinions. We may be oppressed by them or uplifted by them but there's little doubt that they affect us. And when we listen too much to them, we are not listening to the work itself. One of greatest (and most difficult to achieve) values in the process of art making, is the dialogue that goes on within the work itself.

There are many examples of artists articulating their need to listen to what the work wants to do and how it wants to progress. It may sound trite, but remember the story of Michelangelo when he sculpted The Dying Slave? He was reacting to the block of marble and felt there was a form inside that he simply needed to free. Most fiction writers say that they don't determine what their characters will do; the characters tell the writer what they will do.

Finding the authenticity in your work involves getting rid of encrusted layers of opinions, styles, and accomplishments (yours and others'). And by the way, the most recalcitrant editor of all is probably you. During an interview for one of his exhibitions, the painter Philip Guston spoke, metaphorically, about what it’s like in the studio: “You’re in your studio and it’s filled with all these people: friends, teachers, family, curators, art critics, and soon. One by one they leave, then you're alone. And then yes, finally, you leave, too.” The point is that before you can hear the work, you have to silence all the people in your head telling you what the work means, encouraging you or discouraging you, and bringing their baggage. Even (or especially) you. The conversations, the influence, and the momentum are within the work: one step leads to another; one mark informs the next.

Quantity Equals Quality.

In Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, David Bayles and Ted Orland describe a ceramics teacher who, at the beginning of the semester, split the class in two. One half was told they would be graded on the quantity of work: the more a student produced, the higher the grade. The second group would be graded on quality; to get an A, a student only needed to produce one pot, but it had to be perfect. It turned out that at the end of the semester, the work of highest quality was produced by the students in the “quantity” group. That group was constantly learning and improving, while the other group “sat theorizing about perfection” and did not progress in their actual work.

Most artists I know produce a huge volume of work in order to have just a few pieces to show. Each new piece contains information about the direction they should take. Producing a lot is a way of reaching a destination

Reaching Your Goals.

In school and in business, the physical goals for work are clear: the critique, the portfolio, the product on the shelf, the magazine ad, the annual report, and so on. But there is another way of thinking about the goals for your work, and that is to pay attention to the voyage (or process) of getting there. By trusting the state of not knowing, you keep yourself open. Your unformed ideas need time to meander. Keep working; the answers will come when they are ready. 

Art Without Compromise
Wendy Richmond

September 2014

The important thing is to keep producing. All artists have that quality. You have to be tenacious. –Mary Frank

Tenacious Application

Emotional Pitfalls of a Creative Life – Keys to Mastery. Part III

Complacency: In childhood, the world seemed like an enchanted place. Everything that we encountered had an intensity to it, and sparked feelings of wonder. Now, from our mature viewpoint, we see this wonderment as naive, a quaint quality we have outgrown with our sophistication and vast experience of the real world. Such words as “enchantment” or “wonder” cause us to snicker. Unknown to ourselves, the mind slowly narrows and tightens as complacency creeps into the soul, we stifle our own creativity and never get it back. Fight this downhill tendency as much as you can by upholding the value of active wonder. Constantly remind yourself of how little you truly know, and of how mysterious the world remains.

Conservatism: Creativity is by its nature an act of boldness and rebellion. You are not accepting the status quo or conventional wisdom. You are playing with the very rules you have learned, experimenting and testing the boundaries. The world is dying for bolder ideas, for people who are not afraid to speculate and investigate. Creeping conservatism will narrow your searches, tether you to comfortable ideas, and create a downward spiral—as the creative spark leaves you, you will find yourself clutching even more forcefully to dead ideas, past successes, and the need to maintain your status. Make creativity rather than comfort your goal.

Dependency: You must work hard to develop internal standards and the capacity to see your own work with some distance; What you want in the end is to internalize the voice of your teachers/influences so that you become both teacher and pupil. If you fail to do so you will have no internal gauge as to the value of your work, and you will be blown here and there by the opinions of others, never to find yourself.

Impatience: This is perhaps the single greatest pitfall of them all. This quality continually haunts you, no matter how disciplined you might think you are. You will convince yourself that your work is essentially over and well done, when really it is your impatience speaking and coloring your judgment. The creative process requires continual intensity and vigor. Each exercise or problem or project is different. Hurrying to the end or warming up old ideas will ensure a mediocre result.

Leonardo da Vinci understood the dangers of such impatience. He adopted as his motto the expression ostinato rigore, which translates as “stubborn rigor” or “tenacious application.” For every project he involved himself in—and by the end of his life they numbered in the thousands—he repeated this to himself, so he would attack each one with the same vigor and tenacity. The best way to neutralize our natural impatience is to cultivate a kind of pleasure in pain—like an athlete, you come to enjoy rigorous practice, pushing past your limits, and resisting the easy way out.

Grandiosity: Sometimes greater danger comes from success and praise than from criticism. If we learn to handle criticism well, it can strengthen us and help us become aware of flaws in our work. Praise generally does harm. Ever so slowly, the emphasis shifts from the joy of the creative process to the love of attention and to our ever-inflating ego. Without realizing it, we alter and shape our work to attract the praise that we crave. We must have some perspective. There are always greater geniuses out there than yourself. What must ultimately motivate you is the work itself and the process.

Inflexibility. Being creative involves certain paradoxes. You must know your field inside and out, and yet be able to question its most entrenched assumptions. You must be somewhat naive to entertain certain questions, and optimistic that you will solve the problem at hand; at the same time, you must regularly doubt that you have achieved your goal and subject your work to intensive self-criticism. All of this requires a great deal of flexibility. Flexibility is not an easy or natural quality to develop. Once you spend a period of time being excited and hopeful about an idea, you will find it hard to shift to a more critical position. Once you look at your work with intensity and doubt, you will lose your optimism and your love of what you do. Avoiding these problems takes practice and often some experience—when you have pushed past the doubt before, you will find it easier the next time. In any event, you must avoid emotional extremes and find a way to feel optimism and doubt at the same time—a difficult sensation to describe in words, but something all Creatives have experienced.

Although it involves much pain, the pleasure that comes from the overall process of creativity is of an intensity that makes us want to repeat it. That is why creative people return again and again to such endeavors, despite all of the anxiety and doubt they stir up. We are all in search of feeling more connected to reality – to other people, the times we live in, the natural world, our character, and our own uniqueness. Our culture increasingly tends to separate us from these realities in various ways. One of the most most satisfying and powerful ways to feel this connected is through creative activity. Engaged in the creative process we feel more alive than ever, because we are making something and not merely consuming, Masters of the small reality we create. In doing this work, we are in fact creating ourselves.

Mastery
Robert Greene

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Try again. Fail again. Fail better. –Samuel Beckett

The Gap

What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that 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, and 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 it’s 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.

Ira Glass
Host and executive producer of the National Public Radio show, This American Life.

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If It Doesn't Ship, It's Not Art. –Seth Godin

The Gift Received

Art always involves a collision with a marketplace, an interaction with a recipient, a gift given and a gift received.

You can plan and sketch and curse the system all day, but if you don’t ship, you haven't done your work, because the work involves connection and the generosity behind it. It’s entirely possible that one day your insight will be discovered and that it will touch someone or make a difference. But if you hide your contribution from us, you can’t be considered an artist, because it’s not art until a human connection is made.

We’re not waiting for you to tell us about your notebook filled with ideas. Tell us about the connections you have enabled and the impact you have made instead.

The Icarus Deception
Seth Godin

August 2014

Tension and Insight

"Pain is the truth of art. Art is not a hobby or a pastime. It is the result of an internal battle royal, one between the quest for safety and the desire to matter." – Seth Godin
 

Keys to Mastery. Part II

In the creative lives of almost all Masters, we hear of the following pattern: They begin a project with an initial intuition and an excitement about its potential success. Their project is deeply connected to something personal and primal, and seems very much alive to them.

As their initial nervous excitement inspires them in certain directions, they begin to give their concept shape, narrowing down its possibilities, and channeling their energies into ideas that grow more and more distinct. They enter a phase of heightened focus. But Masters inevitably possess another quality that complicates the work process: They are not easily satisfied by what they are doing. While able to feel excitement, they also feel doubt about the worthiness of their work. They have high internal standards. As they progress, they begin to detect flaws and difficulties in their original idea that they had not foreseen.

As the process begins to become more conscious and less intuitive, that idea once so alive in them starts to seem somewhat dead or stale. This is a difficult feeling to endure and so they work even harder, trying to force a solution. The harder they try, the more inner tension and frustration they create. The sense of staleness grows. In the beginning, their mind teemed with rich associations; now it seems condemned to a narrow track of thought that does not spark the same connections. At certain points in this process, many people would simply give up or settle for what they have – a mediocre and half-realized project. But Masters have been through this before, and on an unconscious level they understand that they must plow forward, and that the frustration, or the feeling of being blocked, has a purpose.

At a particular high point of tension, they let go for a moment. This could be as simple as stopping work and going to sleep; or it could mean deciding to take a break, or to temporarily work on something else. What almost inevitably happens in such moments is that the solution, the perfect idea for completing the work comes to them.

After ten long years of incessant thinking on the problem of general relativity, Albert Einstein decided one evening to simply give up. He had had enough. It was beyond him. He went to bed early, and when he awoke the solution suddenly came to him.

Stories like this are so common as to indicate something essential about the brain and how it reaches certain peaks of creativity. We can explain this pattern in the following way: If we remained as excited as we were in the beginning of our project, maintaining that intuitive feel that sparked it all, we would never be able to take the necessary distance to look at our work objectively and improve upon it. Losing that initial verve causes us to work and rework the idea. It forces us to not settle too early on an easy solution. The mounting frustration and tightness that comes from single-minded devotion to one problem or idea will naturally lead to a breaking point. We realize we are getting nowhere. Such moments are signals from the brain to let go, for however long a period necessary, and most creative people consciously or unconsciously accept this.

When we let go, we are not aware that below the surface of consciousness the ideas and the associations we had built up continue to bubble and incubate. With the feeling of tightness gone, the brain can momentarily return to that initial feeling of excitement and aliveness, which by now has been greatly enhanced by all of our hard work. The brain can now find the proper synthesis to the work, the one that was eluding us because we had become too tight in our approach.

The key is to be aware of this process and to encourage yourself to go as far as you can with your doubts, your re-workings, and your strained efforts, knowing the value and purpose of the frustration and creative blocks you are facing.

There is something elemental about the need for tension. The feeling that we have endless time to complete our work has an insidious and debilitating effect on our minds. Our attention and thoughts become diffused. Our lack of intensity makes it hard for the brain to jolt into a higher gear. The connections do not occur. For this purpose you must always try to work with deadlines, whether real or manufactured. Faced with the slenderest amount of time to reach the end, the mind rises to the level you require. Ideas crowd upon one another.

You don't have the luxury of feeling frustrated. Every day represents an intense challenge, and every morning you wake up with original ideas and associations to push you along. If you don't have such deadlines, manufacture them for yourself. The inventor Thomas Edison understood how much better he worked under pressure. He would deliberately talk to the press about an idea before it was ready. This would create some publicity and excitement in the public as to the possibilities of the proposed invention. If he dropped the ball or let too much time pass, his reputation would suffer, and so his mind would spark into high gear and he would make it happen. In such cases your mind is like the army that is now backed up against the sea or a mountain and cannot retreat. Sensing the proximity of death, it will fight harder than ever.

Mastery
Robert Greene

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Choose Your Obsession

"Photography is my passion, my search for truth, my obsession.” – Alfred Stieglitz
 

Choose your obsessions, rather than letting them choose you, and you will move closer to your goals by learning how to productively obsess.

Clinicians label all obsessions as negative by definition. In real life, however, people regularly experience obsessions that not only serve them beautifully but also constitute an essential part of their effort to make personal meaning. An idea for a novel arises in them, and they begin to obsess about it. The problem of how to get libraries funded in third world countries vexes them, and they obsess about an answer. An issue like freedom consumes them, and they obsess documents like the Bill of Rights into existence.

It is fair to call these genuine obsessions rather than mere interests or even passions, because of the internal pressure generated. When a person really bites into a task, they generate a demand: they suddenly demand of themselves that they produce this novel, invention, or symphony, that they find this vaccine or solve that riddle in higher mathematics, that they turn their idea into some appropriate reality.

A demand is created that is fueled by their need to make personal meaning. This demand amounts to real pressure, as real as any pressure a human being can generate. One moment they are idly weeding the garden; the next moment an idea strikes and they feel compelled to drop everything and get to work. Whether or not they would consciously put it this way, a certain calculation, culminating in a decision, has occurred in their brain. They have calculated that this idea matters. They have decided that this is one of the activities that will define their time on earth and that has the potential to make them feel proud of themselves.

It is that big a thing; and with that bigness come pressure and a real measure of discomfort. This pressure, a combination of excitement at having discovered something worth doing, turmoil as thoughts collide and ideas morph, and fear of not succeeding, can cause sleepless nights, irritability, chewed fingernails and also great satisfaction and moments of pure bliss.

This pressure may feel unbearable at times, but it is the logical consequence of turning ourselves over to a pressing existential demand. A storm is created in the brain as meaning is sparked, passions inflamed, and anxieties stoked. Something suddenly matters and when something matters, the mind engages and the body revs up. We have no choice but to live with this pressure. If the thought is of our own choosing, if it connects to our passions, interests, and existential needs, if it is our best guess as to how we should take responsibility for our freedom, then we embrace the subsequent pressure, endure it, and do our work.

Scientific obsessions lead to miracle drugs, artistic obsessions lead to symphonies, humanitarian obsessions lead to freedom and justice. Productive obsessions are our lifeblood, both for the individual and for all humanity. We should not fear them simply because they put us under unwanted pressure, lend a compulsive edge to our behaviors, or in other ways discomfort and threaten us. Rather, we should learn how to encourage and manage them.

A productive obsession is nothing but a passionately held idea that serves your meaning-making efforts. See if the upside of making personal meaning by productively obsessing doesn’t outweigh the downside of pressuring yourself. Expect to feel challenged; also expect to feel rewarded.

Brainstorm – Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions
Eric Maisel

June 2014

Leave the Shore

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain

Keys to Mastery. Part I

The creative process requires three essential steps: first, choosing the proper Creative Task, the kind of activity that will maximize our skills and knowledge; second, loosening and opening up the mind through certain Creative Strategies; and third, creating the optimal mental conditions for a Breakthrough or Insight. Finally, throughout the process we must also be aware of the Emotional Pitfalls - complacency, boredom, grandiosity, and the like, that continually threaten to derail or block our progress. If  we can move through the steps while avoiding these traps, we cannot fail to unleash powerful creative forces from within.

Step One: The Creative Task:

You must begin by altering your very concept of creativity and by trying to see it from a new angle. Most often, people associate creativity with something intellectual, a particular way of thinking. The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self - our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds. To make a discovery, to invent something that connects with the public, to fashion a work of art that is meaningful, inevitably requires time and effort. This often entails years of experimentation, various setbacks and failures, and the need to maintain a high level of focus. You must have patience and faith that what you are doing will yield something important. You could have the most brilliant mind, teeming with knowledge and ideas, but if you choose the wrong subject or problem to attack, you can run out of energy and interest. In such a case all of your intellectual brilliance will lead to nothing.

The task that you choose to work on must have an obsessive element. It must connect to something deep within you. You must be like Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick, obsessed with hunting down the Great White Whale. With such a deep-rooted interest, you can withstand the setbacks and failures, the days of drudgery, and the hard work that is always a part of any creative action.

It is the choice of where to direct his or her creative energy that makes the Master. When Thomas Edison saw his first demonstration of the electric are light, he knew then and there that he had found the ultimate challenge and the perfect goal toward which to direct his creative energies. It was the perfect riddle for him to solve. He had met his creative match. For Rembrandt, it was not until he found particular subject matters that appealed to him - dramatic scenes from the Bible and elsewhere that conveyed the darker and more tragic aspects of life - that he rose to the occasion and invented a whole new way of painting and capturing light.

Your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work. If you go at your work with half a heart, it will show in the lackluster results. If you are doing something without a real emotional commitment, it will translate into something that lacks a soul and that has no connection to you. You may not see this, but you can be sure that the public will feel it and that they will receive your work in the same lackluster spirit it was created in. If you are excited and obsessive in the hunt, it will show in the details. If your work comes from a place deep within, its authenticity will be communicated. This applies equally to science and business as to the arts. Your creative task may not rise to the same obsessive level as it did for Edison but it must have a degree of this obsessiveness or your efforts will be doomed. You must never simply embark on any creative endeavor in your field, placing faith in your own brilliance to see it through. You must make the right, the perfect choice for your energies and your inclinations.

There are two additional things to keep in mind: First, the task that you choose must be realistic. The knowledge and skills you have gained must be eminently suited to pulling it off. To reach your goal you may have to learn a few new things, but you must have mastered the basics and possess a solid enough grasp of the field so that your mind can focus on higher matters. On the other hand, it is always best to choose a task that is slightly above you, one that might be considered ambitious on your part - the higher the goal, the more energy you will call up from deep within. You will rise to the challenge because you have to, and will discover creative powers in yourself that you never suspected.

Second, you must let go of your need for comfort and security. Creative endeavors are by their nature uncertain. You may know your task, but you are never exactly sure where your efforts will lead. If you need everything in your life to be simple and safe, this open-ended nature of the task will fill you with anxiety. If you are worried about what others might think and about how your position in the group might be jeopardized, then you will never really create anything. You will unconsciously tether your mind to certain conventions, and your ideas will grow stale and flat. If you are worried about failure or going through a period of mental and financial instability, your worries will be reflected in your work.

Think of your self as an explorer. You cannot find anything new if you are unwilling to leave the shore.

Mastery
Robert Greene

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Stretch Into the Unknown

“Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Why make Art? Because you can. Art is what it is to be human.

Changing Your Framework For Success:

Competent people enjoy being competent. Once you’re good at something, changing what you do or moving to a new way of doing it will be stressful because it will make you (momentarily) incompetent.

Art is threatening because it always involves moving away from the comfort zone into the unknown. The unknown is the black void, the place where failure can happen (and so can success). Our instinct, then, particularly if we’re successful at one thing, is to avoid the unknown.

To stay in the comfort zone and ignore the fact that the safety zone has moved. No one taught you how to do art. There are generations of thinking about what it means to challenge your fear and create something worth talking about - something that changes people - so you don’t have to start from scratch. If you decide that its important to stop complying and start creating, the first thing to do is change your framework, the worldview you bring to your work.

The framework changes what we see and changes what we tell ourselves is important. And the revolution is tearing your old framework down.

Your Pain Is Real:

It’s the pain of possibility, vulnerability, and risk. Once you stop feeling it, you’ve lost your best chance to make a difference.

The easiest way to avoid the pain is to lull it to sleep by finding a job that numbs you. Soon the pain of the artist will be replaced by a different sort of pain, the pain of the cog, the pain of someone who knows that his gifts are being wasted and that his future is out of his control.

It’s not a worthwhile trade. In the words of Joseph Campbell, you’re doing art “for the experience of being alive.” The alternative is to be numb, to lull yourself into the false sense of security offered by the promise of the rare well-paid job where you are doing someone else’s bidding.

The pain is part of being alive. Art is the narrative of being alive.

Like a growth spurt for a teenager, the pain of facing the void where art lives is part of the deal, our stretching into a better self.

The Icarus Deception – how high will you fly?
Seth Godin

January 2014

The Flip Side of the Soul

“The right photographic image can knowingly work at the level of allusion, switching back and forth between hard fact, metaphor, symbolism, and formal poetry.” - Gerry Badger

If the power of the photographic medium lies in its relationship with reality, or rather, actuality, nowhere is that power quite so apparent as in the portrait. The photograph continues to astonish us chiefly by virtue of its faculty as a realist medium, by virtue of the simple statement “this is how something, or someone, appeared then.” A painted portrait by say, Rembrandt, is an extremely complex artifact, part icon, part representation, part symbol, part antique. Even in reproduction, we can hardly look at a Rembrandt as a mere image, without also considering it as a banknote of boundless denomination.

The photograph is quite a different kettle of fish. Unless it is a so-called vintage print, which is a somewhat spurious attempt by the art market to lend the photograph the aura and the cachet of the painting/antique, the photograph largely blows extra-pictorial issues of market provenance away. A photograph by definition is a reproduction rather than an original, a reproduction that carries and confronts us directly with an actual chemical trace of a human being in a particular place at a particular time. If we pause to think about that for a moment, we must admit that this is awesome, but it is an awesomeness of a totally different order to the painterly wonders of a Rembrandt.

Our engagement with the photographic portrait, unlike that of the painted portrait, is not that of the connoisseur but that of the voyeur. We gaze not at the painter’s work but at the photographer’s subject. Sometimes the subject gazes back, giving as good as they get. Our gaze as viewers is essentially one-sided, with all the assumptions of privilege and power that entails, given to us by the momentary, act of clicking a shutter, with or without the subject’s consent. The photographer, therefore, bears a degree of responsibility. He or she really is in the business of stealing souls, or, if we put a positive spin upon it, of conferring the gift of immortality. For why do we almost obsessively take so many portraits of ourselves and our loved ones, if not to confirm our existence and immortalize ourselves by arresting time for an eerie instant, vainly erecting this flimsy bulwark against time and decrepitude?

In the long run, when face-to-face with a subject, when putting us face-to-face with them, the photographer makes choices in accordance with his or her sensibility, his morality and compassion or lack of it. Every portrait photographer sets down only surface aspect, that in the hands of the wrong sensibility might merely reveal opportunism and brutish misanthropy. In the hands of the right sensibility it can reveal much more, a life, a fellow human being, a mensch, and what photographer Charles Harbutt has described as “the flip side of the soul.” Every photographer confers the gift, welcome or unwelcome, of some kind of seditious immortality upon a sitter. Whether that gift is conferred carelessly and without charm, making it hardly worth a row of beans, or with grace, style, and moral rectitude, making it worth at least the fabled thousand words, is quite another matter.

The Pleasures of Good Photographs
Gerry Badger

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The Quality of Technique

“Emphasis on technique is justified only so far as it will simplify and clarify the statement of the photographer’s concept. “ -Ansel Adams
 

The first time I used a large-format 4x5 view camera, I fell in love with its beauty, its complex process, and its paraphernalia. The whole experience, from viewing the upside-down image on the glass to seeing the transparencies, was a visual feast. My next step in this adventure was to make a huge Iris print. When I saw the image on the monitor, scanned by an expert who could hold the subtlest highlight and shadow, I got another rush from the mega-dose of detail. It was not until I saw a printed proof that I stopped and really looked at the whole picture. I was shocked to find that it was, after all that work, a dud.

My initial reaction was to blame the failure on my obsession with technique. After some consideration and a cool-down period, I settled into a more balanced view: the quest for technical quality has its pros and cons. It can propel and restrain the quality of the work.

A wonderful aspect of my large-format exploration was the conversation it instigated. People love to discuss what they know. I compared notes with friends about printers and scanners, exchanging files so we could test the differences. I treasured these discussions. In addition to the encouragement they gave, each exchange contributed to my ability to make technically viable work. But at the same time, I lament the fact that the discussions were primarily about technique. When we looked at an image, it was always with a loupe or a histogram. We never discussed the concept, meaning, or relevance of the work.

The pursuit of technical quality is like a club, and it can be both democratic and elitist in its membership policies. Exhibiting knowledge is a generous act, but it is also a way to prove, by using a tangible system of measurement, how good you are. Sometimes the strict allegiance to technical quality is a way to keep the club small and exclusive. The irony is that the people inside the gates are typically the ones who lose. A rejection of a "low quality" technique may also be a lost opportunity. If measurement becomes the focus of the quest, it can inhibit one's ability to wander into uncharted territory.

The conflict between proven quality and unknown opportunities is nothing new. Alfred Stieglitz wrote about it in 1897 in the American Annual of Photography. In his article, "The Hand Camera - Its Present Importance," Stieglitz discussed the popular modern camera that many serious photographers - "champions of the tripod" - considered a toy. According to Stieglitz, Kodak's slogan, "You press the button, we do the rest," fueled the professional belief that the hand camera and bad work were synonymous. Stieglitz, however, saw the value in this "toy." Because of its "ease in mechanical working," the camera became second nature to use, "so the eyes and mind can be fully occupied with the subject." Stieglitz discussed the reaction of his colleagues when he showed them the negative for his picture Fifth Avenue - Winter. They advised him to "throw away such rot*: 'Why, it isn't even sharp and he wants to use it for an enlargement!'" Stieglitz declared that his negatives "are all made with the express purpose of enlargement, and it is but rarely that I use more than part of the original shot." He went on to state that this camera had opened up a new area of work for photographers. Stieglitz emphasized skills that were not technical, but instead, grounded in looking. He described patience, studying lines and lighting, and finding the moment at which everything is in balance and "satisfies your eye."

Professionals and amateurs alike, in any of the arts, sometimes wander off their intended paths and get tangled in the thicket of technique, whether it's the pursuit of or rejection of technical quality. When the work is in balance, technique is neither the hero nor the enemy.

*As a side note, "the rot" titled Fifth Avenue - Winter sold for $314,599 at auction in 2007.

Art Without Compromise
Wendy Richmond

September 2013

The Deep Furrow

When I’m ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.  -Ansel Adams

Photographic style is one of the more vexing issues confronting the photographer of ambition and serious intent. Every photographer needs to get his or her work noticed, and the most immediate, therefore most conventional way of achieving this is to formulate an instantly recognizable style, an individual voice. It is, they say, the squeaky wheel that gets oiled, the loudest most obvious voice that gains instant attention, though in the long run, the stentorian clamor might not necessarily be heeded. Nevertheless, every artist must develop some kind of authorial consistency in his or her work, or else it is formless - and form, in one way or another, must always be the artist’s goal. There are, of course, many ways of cultivating this necessary state of affairs, some of which are consciously even artificially grafted on to the corpus of the work, others that emanate from deep within the photographers persona, as ineffable as his or her subconscious. It is safe to say that the style each individual eventually settles upon, their creative calling card, is a complex mélange of conscious and unconscious elements, carefully considered or completely intuitive, imported from the “outside” or dredged up from “within.”

The great problem with style is that it is essentially reductive, a refining of the look of a work so that each single image relates formally to another. Style indeed, might be defined as the formal establishment of constraints by the artist - be they technical, formalist, conceptual, or contextual. Think of almost any major painter or sculptor of the twentieth century (for style is largely, though not exclusively a twentieth-century issue), and you can name a few key works that define the style, all others emanating from or revolving around the keys. Only the very greatest individuals, those with huge artistic personas, and imaginations to match - like Picasso or Duchamp - escape the straitjacket, or the discipline of style, and then sheer force of personality, rather than the more usual stylistic traits becomes the “style.” The rest of us are confined to plowing narrower furrows, although the narrow furrow can, of course, contain great depth.

The Pleasures of Good Photographs
Gerry Badger

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The Passion and Voice
The best photographs come from obsessive photographers”.- Gerry Badger

THE PASSION KEY. Part 2

A logical - and vital - relationship exists between passion and voice. It is very hard to be passionate about what you're doing if you haven't found your voice as an artist. Whether you have been forced by circumstance not to create in your own voice, or whether you've avoided creating in your own voice for psychological reasons, the result will be a tremendous lack of passion for what you're doing. Creating in your authentic voice produces and sustains passion. With that in mind, here are some ideas for finding or reclaiming your voice.

- Allow risk-taking to feel risky. Very often the personal work you want to do feels risky. Intellectually, you may find a way to convince yourself that the risk is worth taking - but when you try to take the risk, you balk because you suddenly feel anxiety welling up. Remember that a risk should feel risky.

- Think at least a little bit about positioning. You may want to develop your voice independent of art trends and say exactly what you want to say in exactly the way you want to say it. On the other hand, it may serve you to take an interest in what's going on and make strategic decisions about how you want to position yourself vis-a-vis the world of galleries, collectors, exhibitions, auctions, movements, and so on. It isn't so much that one way is right and the other is wrong but rather that some marriage of the two, if you can pull it off, may serve you best: a marriage, that is, of marketplace strategizing and of intensely personal work that allows you to speak passionately in your own voice.

- Try to articulate what you're attempting. Artists are often of two minds as to whether they want to describe what they are attempting. Paraphrasing a visual experience into a verbal artist's statement often feels unconvincing and beside the point. On the other hand, it can prove quite useful to announce to yourself what you hope to accomplish with your new work. By trying to put your next efforts into words, you may clarify your intentions and as a consequence more strongly value your efforts. The better you can describe what you are doing, the better you may understand your artistic voice - and the more passionate you can be in talking about your work.

- Revisit your earliest passions. Life has a way of causing us to forget where our genuine passions reside. You may have spent decades in a big city and completely forgotten how much the desert means to you. You may have been so busy painting and parenting that your passion for creating a series of cityscapes fell off the map somewhere along the line. Finding your voice may involve something as simple and straight forward as making a list of your loves and starring the ones that still energize you. This is one of the simplest and smartest ways to discover what you are passionate about and what you want to say.

- Accept never-before-seen results. It can feel odd to speak in your own voice and then not recognize the results. Because what you've created may be genuinely new and completely new to you - it may look like nothing you've ever seen before. That can prove disconcerting! Don't rush to judge it as too odd, a mess or a mistake, or not what you'd intended. Give it some time to grow on you and speak to you. Your voice may sound unfamiliar to you if you’ve never heard it before!

Remember: One of the keys to maintaining passion and enthusiasm for your work is finding your own voice and speaking in it.

Making Your Creative Mark - Nine Keys to Achieving your Artistic Goals
Eric Maisel

July 2013

Obsessional Power

“What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.” - Eugene Delacroix

Is photography an art? Is it really a serious activity or a serious art? Does it really have a proper place in the university curriculum, as a department in museums? Is it different from the other art forms? In a sense, this is a phony debate, because there is no doubt the battle has been won.

The question is rather, if photography is an art and is socially or sociologically accepted, is it an art like any other? It isn’t exactly an art, like painting, and perhaps that may explain something about its current influence. In some way I would suggest that photography is not so much an art as a meta-art. It's an art which devours other art. It is a creation, a creation in the form of some certain kind of visual image, but it also cannibalizes and very concretely reproduces other forms of art; there is a creation of images, images which would not exist if we did not have the camera. But there is also a sense in which photography takes the whole world as its subject, cannibalizes all art forms, and converts them into images. And in that sense it seems a peculiarly modern art. It may be the art that is most appropriate to the fundamental terms and concerns of an industrial consumer society. It has the capacity to turn every experience, every event, every reality into a commodity or an object or image. One of the fundamental axes of modern thought is this contrast between image and reality. It doesn't seem wrong to say that our society is rooted or centered in a certain proliferation of images in a way that no other society has been.

The world becomes a series of events that you transform into pictures, and those events have reality, so far as you have the pictures of them.

Most people in this society have the idea that to take a picture is to say, among other things: ‘this is worth photographing.’ And to appraise an event as valuable or interesting or beautiful is to wish to have a photograph of it. It has gotten built into our very way of perceiving things, that we have a fundamentally appropriative relationship to reality. We think that the properly flattering contact with anything is to want to photograph it. And the camera has indeed become part of our sensibility.

There are an unlimited number of photographs to take, every photographer feels that. There are not an unlimited number of things to write, except in a very cerebral sense, which no writer really feels. For the photographer, the world is really there; it is an incredible thing, it is all interesting and in fact, more interesting when ‘seen through the camera' than when seen with the naked eye or with real sight. The camera is this thing which can capture the world for you. It enables you to transform the world, to miniaturize it. And photographs have a special status for us as icons and as magical objects that other visual images such as paintings and other forms of representational art such as literature do not have. I do not think that any other way of creating image systems has the same kind of obsessional power behind it.

Susan Sontag

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Get Obsessed
“Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.” - Claude Monet

THE PASSION KEY. Part 1

Many creative people and most would-be creative people are interested in their artistic projects but not passionately interested in them. There is a huge difference here, and a big problem. Mere interest does not sustain motivational energy, and it isn't a match for the obstacles that arise as you try to create. You need passionate interest in order to generate energy and to see you through the rigors of creating.

Passion and its synonyms; love, curiosity, enthusiasm, excitement, and energy - are vital to the creative process. Though it is possible to create without passion, your art will suffer, and the likelihood of your continuing over the long haul is greatly reduced. If I had to tease out the key motivator that fuels the artist's journey, it would be passion. Passion creates and restores mental energy.

Creating is hard, and what that means is that every day we may find our creative progress hard - and it is difficult to love something that presents us with problems. Since that love may not come naturally or may evaporate all too easily in the face of difficulties, you must learn how to kindle passion - and how to rekindle it when it vanishes.

So let's begin by looking at some ways to rekindle that passion.

1. Get obsessed. The word obsession got co-opted by the mental health industry and turned into a negative by definition. When you define obsessions as "intrusive, unwanted thoughts," then naturally all obsessions seem negative. But not every repetitive thought is unwanted or intrusive - some are exactly the thoughts we want. One way to fall back in love with your work is to allow yourself to obsess about it - to really bite into it, to really think about it, and to pay real, obsessive attention to it.

2. Be a little more impetuous. You may be living in a careful, controlled, and contained way to ensure that you are taking care of all your responsibilities and getting the items checked off your perpetual to-do list. That way of living can be entirely appropriate, but it pretty much bars the door on impetuosity.

3. Accept that you have appetites. We all have these appetites, and creative people tend to have even bigger appetites than most, which is why addiction is such a big problem in the arts. But when we try to rein in these appetites, as an unintended consequence we also rein in our appetite to create. Rather than reining in all your appetites, just rein in those that produce negative consequences. Let yourself be really hungry when it comes to creating.

4. Be ambitious. Sometimes we sell ourselves on the idea that it is unseemly to have ambitions and that ambitiousness is a manifestation of narcissism or pride. It is really nothing of the kind. To have ambitions is really just to have desires, to have passions. It is perfectly proper to have desires and passions and to want things like best-sellers, or gallery shows, or articles written about you, or anything of that sort. Try to free yourself from the idea that there is something wrong with feeling and being ambitious, since those ambitions are really just manifestations of desire - and desire is a good thing!

5. Feel devoted to your work. Luciano Pavarotti said: "People think I'm disciplined. It's not discipline, it's devotion, and there's a great difference." We are in a completely different relationship with our art when we feel devoted to it as opposed to when we feel it is something we should be doing. If you have never felt really devoted to anything, you may want to locate that feeling in your being and to start treating your art as an object of your devotion.

6. Opt for intensity and even exhaustion. One of the ways we honor our pledge to make personal meaning is to do the work required of us, even if that effort exhausts us. If it exhausts us, we rest, but we do not let the fear of exhaustion prevent us from making our meaning. Try to live intensely. Exhaust yourself in the service of your work.

7. Understand the power of our cultural and societal injunctions against passion. Those injunctions can easily stop you from expressing the passion you feel. We are a very buttoned-down, unexpressive, don't-let-your-emotions-show kind of culture, and everyone is in that cultural trance. It can feel very hard to go against the grain and act passionately in the service of your ideas and projects. If you know that you are somehow inhibited by cultural messages and by the demand not to look conspicuous, think through what you can do to shed that cultural straitjacket.

8. Remember that passion isn't unseemly. We have to get it out of our heads that being passionate about our work, being obsessed with our work, or being in love with our work is unseemly. If we are holding some mental injunction against passion or some internal lack of permission to be passionate, that judgment will severely restrict our ability to create.

9. Remember that passion isn't a given. You have to bring the passion - it won't appear just because you showed up at the canvas or the computer screen. The mere getting there isn't enough. You need to bring enthusiasm, love, and passion with you, which you do by actively falling back in love with your work and by investing meaning in it.

10. Remember that passion isn't optional. To repeat the main point here, we have very little mental energy for something that barely interests us, for something whose difficulty outweighs its desirability. If we inject passion into our work and think of it as something we love and to which we are devoted, it will flourish.

Making Your Creative Mark - Nine Keys to Achieving your Artistic Goals
Eric Maisel

May 2013

Finding Your Photographic Voice

“The mission of the photographer is to put a frame around things you have seen all your life
and yet haven’t seen at all.” - David Goldhlatt

One of the key tropes in American modernist photography has been the concept of the transcendental photograph, proposing that photographs, rather than simply documenting surface appearance, could function like any other kind of art, as equivalents for philosophical ideas and psychological feelings. The photograph ideally would become an abstract carrier of meaning and emotion in the manner of music. The idea was to read things in the image, rather like staring at the flickering flames of a fire and letting the imagination wander.

Alas, it seems that in all too many cases photographers might photograph something without actually saying very much about it, except to compose the image competently and record something of what is there. In other words, too many photographers have little to say beyond the obvious and superficial. Many photographers do not move beyond the stage of being interested in photography for its own sake rather than being interested in the world. If Garry Winogrand had actually followed his own famous maxim and simply photographed to see what the world looked like in a photograph, I do not think his work would be so interesting. The fact that he went way beyond that to reveal not only his worldview, but a complex, slippery, tortured human being is what made him a great photographer.

The real trick - and here photography becomes immensely difficult and complex – is deciding what to photograph. And that, in essence, is a two-step process, or more accurately, a two-level process. The first step, or level, deciding upon the raw material - trees, nudes, war, raindrops on windows - represents a photographer finding her or his subject matter. It’s an important step, but not yet “job done.” The second, and much more difficult step, is to say something - something unobvious and personal - about the raw material. The two are very different entities, and a photographer’s subject may bear only the most oblique relationship to her subject matter.

The problem is the medium’s presumed literalness, so the photographer is not only trying to go beyond subject matter and find subject, she has to take her audience with her. Most people, and this can include people quite sophisticated and well versed in other arts, assume that if the photograph is of a white horse, the photographer is talking about white horses rather than loneliness or loss, or any number of apparently unlikely subjects, as well as the more obvious metaphors like strength or grace. The difference between what is photographed and what is actually said. Of course, the ultimate task for any photographer is to tell the subject’s tale, as well as her own.

In her book Immediate Family (1992), Sally Mann wrote: “When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths ‘told slant,’ just as Emily Dickinson commanded. We are spinning a story of what it is to grow up. It is a complicated story and sometimes we try to take on the grand themes: anger, love, death, sensuality and beauty. But we tell it all without fear and without shame.”

The Pleasures of Good Photographs
Gerry Badger

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Mastering Your Tools

“The camera is my tool. Through it I give a reason to everything around me.” - Andre Kertesz

Each medium of expression imposes its own limitations on the artist - limitations inherent in the tools, materials, or processes he employs. In the older art forms these natural confines are so well established they are taken for granted. We select music or dancing, sculpture or writing because we feel that within the frame of that particular medium we can best express whatever it is we have to say.

The photographer’s most important and likewise most difficult task is not learning to manage his camera, or to develop, or to print. It is learning to see photographically - that is, learning to see his subject matter in terms of the capacities of his tools and processes, so that he can instantaneously translate the elements and values in a scene before him into the photograph he wants to make.

By varying the position of his camera, his camera angle, or the focal length of his lens, the photographer can achieve an infinite number of varied compositions with a single, stationary subject. Within the limits of his medium, the photographer can depart from literal recording to whatever extent he chooses.

The vast number of controls available often act as a barrier to creative work. The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don’t know what to do with it.

To consult rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Such rules and laws are deduced from the accomplished fact; they are the products of reflection and after-examination, and are in no way a part of the creative impetus. When subject matter is forced to fit into preconceived patterns, there can be no freshness of vision. Following rules of composition can only lead to a tedious repetition of pictorial clichés.

Only long experience will enable the photographer to subordinate technical considerations to pictorial aims. With practice this kind of knowledge becomes intuitive; the photographer learns to see a scene or object in terms of his finished print without having to give conscious thought to the steps that will be necessary to carry it out.

Photographer Edward Weston

March 2013

What Makes a Great Photograph

“What, to me, makes Walker Evans a great photographer, is that sense that his lens has cut like an especially sharp knife into the light and drawn out a radiant fact.” Tod Papageorge

Photography, at the moment of the shutter’s release, is a formal business. For any photographer, whatever he or she may think prior to or after that crucial instant, they are faced with an aesthetic problem how to arrange forms in space and time.

The very act of respecting an object and recording it with the utmost perceptual clarity is in itself a transcendental, almost mystical act. The recognition of the object by the photographer and his donation of the gift of ultra-lucidity through the agency of the camera in effect raises that object to a higher plane of reality. It becomes “a thing, yet more than a thing,” to paraphrase Edward Weston. Our awareness of the object becomes intensified, much more so than if we were to confront it in actuality, outside the photograph. Every last detail, every subtlety, every minutia is immutably frozen and preserved for our elucidation, our delectation, and our dissection. But such clarity, far from displaying the dry, dull hermetic quality of the plain empirical record, may almost engulf and dazzle us with its intoxicating intensity. The spots of reality picked up by photography must be searing. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Because all knowledge is assimilation to the object of knowledge, as the power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the description of it be. The poet must be a rhapsodist.”

Here, the question of intentionality might be dealt with. Some photographers develop stylistic or compositional traits in a deliberate and self-conscious manner. It is the way a photographer tends to repeat patterns of composition, over many photographs, establishing a visual signature or “way of seeing.” Particularly today, where the art market demands an instantly recognizable style that can be neatly packaged, photographers tend to limit both their range of subject matter and its treatment in a search for brand identity.

What makes a very good, or a great photographer? Is it a steady accumulation of stunning single images, in the manner of a painter, the standout pictures that catch the eye in an art gallery and immediately attract their imitators, perhaps forming the beginnings of a school? Is the great photographer characterized by style? There is a presumption, with the recent art market interest in the medium, that photographers who are artists rather than mere photographers distinguish themselves as such by exhibiting a marked style. Therefore there is a tendency, to progressively distill one’s vision, reducing the range of subject matter and its treatment until it can be claimed - usually by the glariest - that so-and-so has developed an original and instantly recognizable style. Style equals branding, and branding means sales, so we get the fairly common phenomenon of the photographer who hits upon one extraordinary image and then repeats it, with minor variations, for the rest of his or her career.

Or are the really great photographers drawn from the ranks of those who reject visual style in favor of visual sensibility, those who recognize that the medium is profligate rather than reductive, and more akin to the film or the novel than the painting? Those accordingly, who tend to put content before form.

Of course, there are no rules for creating great photographers. Great artists, great photographers, reach such a pinnacle because they do not follow the norm. They break the rules. They follow their instincts and convictions, not the herd and the smart money. But in my view at least, the best photographers tend to come from the last category, those whose style and individuality emanates from deep within them, and is not, as is the case I feel with all too many, something grafted on from outside.

In my view photography is a kind of discipline. Each clicking of the camera shutter should be a new adventure, an imaginative and appropriate response to a problem. I feel suspicious of an insistence upon consistent style within photography. Style in photography - at its best - should emanate from a particular response to a particular subject and a particular set of circumstances, acted upon by a particular sensibility. So we can identify almost immediately a Walker Evans, a Robert Frank, a William Eggleston, or a Robert Adams, but we cannot ascribe to them a particular style, a predetermined aesthetic, as we can to so many other photographers who take care that their look, pared down to the reductivity of a signature, makes them easily branded in the market.

Artist is a pretentious, somewhat meaningless term if you put it on your passport to signify your occupation, but one that means everything if you gain the approbation of your peers for doing an excellent job and making work of a standard to which they might happily aspire.

The Pleasures of Good Photographs
Gerry Badger

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The Importance of Criticism

“The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.” - Oscar Wilde

Photography and the nature of photographic communication attracted debate throughout the twentieth century. The photograph is a particular sort of image, one which operates through freezing a moment in time, portraying objects, people and places as they appeared within the view of the camera at that moment. Photography has thus contributed to the dislocation of time and space, enlightening and enlivening history and geography. As such, it has attracted scrutiny from philosophers concerned with its semiotic structure and phenomenological impact.

Photographs often do not activate individual memory directly, but operate through soliciting identification with needs, desires, and circumstances. Obvious instances of this include advertising, fashion or travel imagery which may mobilise memories - from childhood, of romantic interludes, of family events, or whatever - but the links articulated are more indirect.

Photography encompasses a range of differing types of social and artistic practices engaging various audiences in a wide variety of contexts. As critical photo readers, we need to link considerations about the photograph as a particular sort of artifact with questions of uses of photography and its effects. Through such discussions, we can consider how and in what circumstances, we use photographs. As photographers, curators or critics, we can move from thinking about photography to thinking about the world differently, and, indeed, reconsidering our place and and contribution.

Prior to asking what we need to know about photography we might also ask why criticism is of interest to us; how it helps practitioners, curators, historians and media analysts. Given the inter-relation of theory and practice, critical skills inform and support artistic development as well as contributing to more general involvement with ideas and cultural processes. To lack the analytic skills, knowledge and confidence in judgment involved in critical engagement is, in effect, to be disempowered.

The Photography Reader
Liz Wells, editor

January 2013

The Acquisition of Creative Energy

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by the age of eighteen.”             - Albert Einstein

With our present knowledge, even an expert neuroanatomist could not tell Einstein’s brain from yours or mine. In terms of the capacity for processing information, all brains are extremely alike. The limits on how many bits of information we can process at any given time are also similar. Nor is the speed of information processing noticeably different from one brain to the next. In principle, because of the similarity in cerebral hardware, most people could share the same knowledge and perform mental operations at similar levels. Yet what enormous differences there are in how people think and what they think about!

In terms of using mental energy creatively, perhaps the most fundamental difference between people consists in how much uncommitted attention they have left over to deal with novelty. In too many cases, attention is restricted by external necessity. We cannot expect a man who works two jobs, or a working woman with children, to have much mental energy left over to learn a domain, let alone innovate in it. Einstein is supposed to have written his classic papers on the kitchen table of his small apartment in Berne, while rocking the pram of his baby. But the fact is that there are real limits to how many things a person can attend to at the same time, and when survival needs require all of one’s attention, none is left over for being creative.

But often the obstacles are internal. In a person concerned with protecting his or her self, practically all the attention is invested in monitoring threats to the ego. This defensiveness may have very understandable causes: Children who have been abused or who have experienced chronic hunger or discrimination are less likely to be curious and interested in novelty for its own sake, because they need all the psychic energy they have simply to survive. Another limitation on the free use of mental energy is an excessive investment of attention in selfish goals. Of course, we all must first and foremost take care of our own needs. But for some people the concept of “need” is inflated to the point that it becomes an obsession that devours every waking moment. When everything a person sees, thinks, or does must serve self-interest, there is little attention left over to learn about anything else.

To free up creative energy we need to let go and divert some attention from the pursuit of the predictable goals that genes and memes have programmed in our minds and use it instead to explore the world around us on its own terms.

So the first step toward a more creative life is the cultivation of curiosity and interest, that is, the allocation of attention to things for their own sake. On this score, children tend to have the advantage over adults; their curiosity is like a constant beam that highlights and invests with interest anything within range. The object need not be useful, attractive, or precious; as long as it is mysterious it is worthy of attention. With age most of us lose the sense wonder, the feeling of awe in confronting the majesty and variety of the world. Yet without awe life becomes routine. Creative individuals are childlike in that their curiosity remains fresh even at ninety years of age; they delight in the strange and the unknown. And because there is no end to the unknown, their delight also is endless.

At first, curiosity is diffuse and generic. The child’s attention attracted to any novelty - cloud or bug, grandfather’s cough or a rusted nail. With time, interest usually becomes channeled into a specific domain. A ninety-year-old physicist may retain childhood curiosity in the realm of subatomic particles but is unlikely to have enough free attention left over to marvel at much else. Therefore, creativity within a domain often goes hand in hand with conformity in the rest of life. Einstein at the peak of his breakthroughs in physics played traditional music on his violin. But narrowing attention to a single domain does not mean limiting the novelty one is able to process; on the contrary, complex domains like poetry, history, physics, or politics reveal constantly expanding perspectives to those who venture to explore them.

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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The Open Mind

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To them...a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.”             - Pearl S. Buck

When we think of the creative mind, we think of the generative mind, full of ideas and brilliant new insights. But the creative mind is both full and empty. It is able to create within itself a space for new ideas to arise. It is a mind that is constantly opening itself to the internal and external world.

The opened mind can be relaxed and playful. It is filled with curiosity and wonder. There is something childlike about it. It loves to get off the beaten track, to explore paths that are not the ones taken by social convention. Playfulness is sometimes important. The opened mind likes to play with an idea or object, and enjoys looking at it as if for the first time. It challenges assumptions, makes new connections, finds new ways of viewing the world.

Some of the most creative minds of all time have allowed themselves to drift into reveries and dream states, into extended meditations during which they courted the irrational, the symbolic, the metaphorical, and the mysterious. Often enough they bring back images that they translate into theories, compositions, and actions.

We have all had the experience of forgetting somebody's name, trying desperately to remember it and failing miserably, only to find that the name pops up at the oddest time after we've given up, or "let go," of the search. In a similar way, it has been argued that the creative process involves a period of "letting go" that follows the initial immersion in ones subject. The argument is that we need time to "digest" the issue, perhaps let the unconscious mull it over without conscious interference. The potential reward is that our idea will then pop up when we least expect it - say in the shower. "For something to enter," mystic and philosopher, C. Bennett writes, "a place must he made for it."

Bennett states: I hope to convey to you something of what I have been able to recognize over many years' experience of the factors important to creative thinking. What are the conditions for creativity? First of all, one must be living in the medium. People are not creative in some medium with which they have no real contact. In that sense, if we wish to think creatively we have to be in the process of thinking. Then we have somehow to bring into it additional factors which will give that process the quality of creativity for which we are looking. There is the saying that creativity is ninety-nine parts perspiration and one part inspiration-in other words, that it is mostly very hard work. But there is no doubt of the importance of some second element in creativity that we ourselves cannot control. I am going to call that element spontaneity. If you read accounts of creative activity by scientists, artists or others, you see in these accounts that the spontaneous element is really out of the person's control. Yet, though it comes unexpectedly, spontaneity does not come without certain conditions being satisfied;

The third and final element that enters into all this, I shall call technique. Lets take the example of an artist. Without technique, the moment of creative insight can hardly be made fruitful. The same is true for the scientist. This means that one must know the form that will enable one to clothe the moment of insight in some expression. First, one must know the form of thought for oneself, so that the insight may become clear, and afterwards one must know the form of expression so that it may be communicated to others.

Creators on Creating. Awakening and Cultivating the Imaginative mind.
The Nature of Creativity - Questions and (maybe) Answers.
Frank Barron, Alfonso Montuori, Anthea Barron

November 2012

Aesthetics or Truth

“For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensible: intoxication.” - Nietzche

In the presence of something that delights us, we tend to leave questions of truth or untruth behind us. When, in (the Dickens novel) Bleak House, the Law shamelessly grinds, relents, stumbles back to the point, and then reaches decisions as marked as much by injustice as by delay, the shape described by that process is a shape we all know. Whether or not Dickens is correct in all of the particulars that he uses to support his descriptions is less important than that he has drawn for us the awful form of frustration. That is enough documentation for most of us, and enough truth.

When we think about photographs rather than novels, however, we seem to feel that we are dealing with a distinctly different process. The usual suspension of disbelief that we make for books, poems, paintings, and even films does not appear to be appropriate in the face of the photograph’s faithful depiction. We tend to believe that photographs obviously “tell” us the truth, and effortlessly so. That we may be confusing the truth with a particular form of visual description rarely enters our minds: there is the world in the picture, just as we have always known and seen it.

Because of their transparent quality, most of us also feel free when we talk about photographs to judge them in ways we would probably not use in judging other works of art. We take on the role of experts and assume that, if we do ask questions of such pictures, our questions will be interesting ones. Thus, we might examine Robert Frank`s The Americans in light of whether or not it tells a certifiable truth about America in the 1950s, without thinking to subject a novel such as Nabokov’s Lolita, for example - written at about the same time by another gifted foreigner - to a similar examination. Such questions may be asked, of course, and may even have a certain value, but I do not think that they are particularly useful questions, at least if we wish to approach the complicated issues that photographs raise. For what I think these questions do is merely support the idea that as long as photographs are confused with or, more precisely, identified with their subjects, then we are going to run in circles when we discuss them.

Now this is not to suggest that photographers do not use the camera’s mimetic gifts to seduce us: that is where photography - and the photographer’s fascination with the medium - begins. Neither would I want to suggest that there are not serious photographers, perhaps most of them, who believe that their pictures are true and faithful recordings of the world - or at least believe it after the fact, away from the frustrating problems of trying to make them seem clear and intentional. Nor will it do to forget that, unlike other pictures, photographs describe things that once actually stood or moved in front of a machine, and therefore seem to be memories as much as they are pictures. None of this, however, negates the fact that photographs are pictures; that they describe prejudices; that they are signs, half-truths, cripples, fictions that live only by moments and know only the surface of things.

The truth is that photographs contain at best an adjusted truth, a mediated truth, a collaboration between the photographer, his subject, and, finally, photography itself.

To extend this idea, however, I would also suggest that this collaboration is much like the one that the poet finds himself working with as he tries to define his subject with language. In fact, I think about photography as a kind of language, a language that names what it describes, much as words name the world. As the poet Denise Levertov, after describing her love of painting, put it:

Yet I have come to see that the art of photography shares with poetry a factor more fundamental: it makes its images by means anybody and everybody uses for the most banal purposes, just as poetry makes its structures, its indivisibilities of music and meaning, out of the same language used for utilitarian purposes, for idle chatter, or for uninspired lying.

Once we accept this general sense about what photography might be, we should also be more careful about the questions we ask of photographs. By splitting the medium into “documentary” and “art” photographs, we are led to the easy conclusion that the “documentary” part of the split has the obligation to meet whatever it is we think “truthful evidence” is. If, however, we think of photography as a kind of whole body that, like the whole body of poetry, displays in a variety of ways the tension that can exist between our sense of the world and the manner in which a language can inflect that sense, we might then decide that photographs are not more or less true, but more or less coherent and achieved.

The meaning of the Greek word aisthetikos is "sensations.” I do not know if love of the medium happens in the way that love of other things seems to happen. I do know that love of photography can change, that it can widen, or more probably, deepen with time. I also know that such love, can be claimed and seemingly defined in almost rational terms. What is impossible to express, however, is that sense a photographer has as he attempts to draw the half-recognized and half-felt into a picture that appears to hold the contour of truth. Not a common truth, but a truth specific to the shape of a particular moment.

-Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography
Tod Papageorge

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Validation is for Parking
“Modern art = I could do that + Yeah, but you didn’t. “ -Craig Damrauer

The trouble with creative work: Sometimes by the time people catch on to what’s valuable about what you do, you’re either a) bored to death with it, or b) dead. You can’t go looking for validation from external sources. Once you put your work into the world, you have no control over the way people will react to it.

Ironically, really good work often appears to be effortless. People will say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”' They won’t see the years of toil and sweat that went into it.

Not everybody will get it. People will misinterpret you and what you do. They might even call you names. So get comfortable with being misunderstood, disparaged, or ignored - the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.

-Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Austin Kleon

October 2012

The Addictive Madness

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” - Jack Kerouac, On the Road

In 1930 Walker Evans told Lincoln Kirstein that the possibilities of the medium excited him so much that he sometimes thought himself mad. For a photographer watching in the street, the dramas there are incalculable, oblique, and continually rising. A sidestep, handshake, kiss, or slow goodbye are metric shifts, sprung rhythms set against the beat of walking. Cameras are like dogs, but dumb, and toward quarry, even more faithful. They point, they render, and defy the photographer who hopes.

Critics, and even photographers, have commonly assumed that photographers should have the same wary, respectful relationship to what they describe in their pictures that moral philosophers presumably have to what they think and write about. This, however, repeats an old confusion: that a picture (or a poem, for that matter), because it resembles the world, is therefore somehow equivalent, and morally responsible, to it. I call this an old confusion because, until the nineteenth century, poems and paintings were often referred to as “mirrors of nature”; and since they seemed to exist then, as photographs do now, as “imitations of life,” were assumed, even while pleasing their audiences, also to be instructing them.

A photograph, however, is just a picture - or, as Winogrand would have it, “the illusion of a literal description of a piece of time and space.” It is as wanton a fiction as any description; but it is also, of course, a particularly convincing one because it so specifically locates and describes what it shows. As a poet knows that the words he chooses for his poem will, by their particular combination, resonate with a power that is the gift of language itself, so a photographer has at his disposal a system of visual indication that, even without his conscious deliberation, will describe the world with a unique, mimetic energy.

W H. Auden’s observation that “it is both the glory and the shame of poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent his words,” could also be said of the photographer’s relation to the things of the physical world: he cannot invent them. By being fictions and, at the same moment, returning their subjects to us with a compelling fidelity, both photographs and poems work with the same surprise: both mediate between our experience and our sense of the-world-as-it-apparently-is, and both strike us as if they were simultaneously remembrances and revelations. In both the poem and the photograph, meaning is inseparable from the series of specific responses we make as we "observe” or “read” the works.

It is in the precision of a picture’s details and the surprised addition we make from them that we discover what the picture is “about” and what it “means,” and with that begin to understand the specific gravity by which a camera can draw the most intractable of facts into a small system, a photograph that works. The best poems are those with the right words in the right order; so are the best photographs those with the right objects in the right position. “Right position,” however, is a difficult problem for a photographer to solve, even in a photograph with an apparently simple form. The slightest shift, whether by the photographer or his subjects, changes the picture that records it as surely as a shift of word order changes a poem. And as more facts are included in the photograph, these problems of position and movement become even more difficult to resolve. The process involved in creating a body of work that possesses this constellated density is a process only the most interested and active mind would attempt.

From wherever it begins, a photograph ends as a cupped abstraction: the thing capsized by a lens, stripped, and projected as an image. If made well, it will give its own shape of delight and, at the same time, be tempered as conclusively as steel. The game is the old one of form set against the specific charge and demand of content. Photographers do not expect others to understand this, but for them the process they use is prodigal, addictive, and maddening.

-Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography
Tod Papageorge

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Imitation

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. “ -Salvador Dali

Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying. We’re talking about practice here, not plagiarism - plagiarism is trying to pass someone else’s work off as your own. Copying is about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.

Musicians learn to play by practicing scales. Painters learn to paint by reproducing masterpieces. Remember: Even The Beatles started as a cover band. Paul McCartney has said, “I emulated Buddy Holly, Little Richard Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis. We all did.” McCartney and his partner John Lennon became one of the greatest songwriting teams in history but as McCartney recalls, they only started writing their own songs “as a way to avoid other bands being able to play our set.”

First, you have to figure out who to copy. Second, you have to figure out what to copy.

Who to copy is easy. You copy your heroes - the people you love, the people you’re inspired by, the people you want to be. The songwriter Nick Lowe says, “You start out by rewriting your hero’s catalog.” And you don’t just steal from one of your heroes, you steal from all of them. The writer Wilson Mizner said if you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s research. I once heard the cartoonist Gary Panter say, “lf you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original!”

What to copy is a little bit trickier. Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes. The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds. That’s what you really want - to internalize their way of looking at the world. If you just mimic the surface of somebody’s work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more than a knockoff.

Francis Ford Coppola said: “We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice. And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you.”

At some point, you’ll have to move from imitating your heroes to emulating them. Imitation is about copying. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing.

“There isn’t a move that’s a new move.” The basketball star Kobe Bryant has admitted that all of his moves on the court were stolen from watching tapes of his heroes. But initially when Bryant stole a lot of those moves, he realized he couldn’t completely pull them off because he didn’t have the same body type as the guys he was thieving from. He had to adapt the moves to make them his own.

Conan O’Brien has talked about how comedians try to emulate their heroes, fall short, and end up doing their own thing. Johnny Carson tried to be Jack Benny but ended up Johnny Carson. David Letterman tried to copy Johnny Carson but ended up David Letterman. And Conan O’Brien tried to be David Letterman but ended up Conan 0’Brien. In O’Brien’s words, “It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.”

A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we’re incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.

In the end, merely imitating your heroes is not flattering them. Transforming their work into something of your own is how you flatter them. Adding something to the world that only you can add.

-Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Austin Kleon

September 2012

The Pleasure of Photographs

“The pleasures of good photographs are the pleasures of good photographs, whatever the particulars of their makeup.” - Lee Friedlander

If looking at photographs is a pleasurable activity - it is pleasurable in a complex, transformative, frequently unsettling sense. It is not pleasure unalloyed, for no profound pleasure is pure and photography is certainly no exception. Like many truly enriching pleasures photography has its dark, troubling even dangerous aspects.

Firstly, photography is fundamentally a deeply melancholic medium. The photograph, while evoking life, also inevitably invokes death. By the time you photograph a moment, that recorded moment is history. This does not mean that photography cannot he used to talk about contemporary life. Paradoxically, the best subject of photography is modern life, but that quickly passes into history.

Secondly, any photographer of ambition, trying to say something significant with the medium, comes up against a fundamental question of perception. To make a photograph, you point a camera at the world in front of you, press the shutter, and it's done. What you have contained in the photographic print is simulacrum of a fragment of the world, and that is precisely how many people view it, as a mirror of the world and not as an image, an intelligent representation of it. A photographer, in short, is his or her subject matter. An interesting photographer is one who can find interesting subject matter.

Photography’s relationship with reality, so simple, so profound, yet so damnably slippery, is unique. The pleasures of good photographs derive principally from an encompassing of that relationship within the image. Photography, more than any other art, is the "art of the real.” The first great pleasure of photography, therefore, is a quality I would term "thereness." Thereness is a sense of the subject's reality, a heightened sense of its physicality, etched sharply into the image. It is a sense that we are looking at the world directly, without mediation, or rather that something other than a mere photographer is mediating. The camera alone perhaps, windowing the world without art or artifice, or that mysterious power itself – reality – gives form and shape by the magical conjunction of chemical surface and light. Such a feeling, such artlessness, when present in the photograph, can of course conceal the greatest photographic art. Thereness is seen at the opposite ends of the photographic spectra, in the humblest holiday drugstore print as much as the most serious "art" photograph; in the snapshot-inspired, dynamic, small-camera candid as much as the calm, meditative, large-camera view.

But there is another element besides place that makes for thereness in photography, and that is time. Photography takes you there, not just in a geographical but also in a temporal sense. Photography is a time machine, especially in relation to people. The vicarious attractions of photography might be measured largely by the medium's faculty to project us directly into visual contact with the physiognomy of someone at the farthest ends of the earth, or a human being who now exists only in history. That is powerful stuff indeed.

The Pleasures of Good Photographs
Gerry Badger

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Creativity and Time
“When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd doubled my age in a year. I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'll be ninety.” - Stephen Wright
The Nature of Creativity. Questions and (maybe) Answers.

Is creativity related to age?

Most, but perhaps not all, creative children grow up to become creative adults. And most creative adults were once creative children (but not all; creativity may be dormant until life awakens it). It does seem that most creative people are creative all through their lives. Follow-up studies of architects and of graduate students at the University of California at Berkely have shown that creativity continues to flourish into old age in many people. Indeed, many a person puts aside a creative interest for a period of years when she or he is involved in the bread-and-butter tasks of setting up a home, having a family, or perhaps pursuing a mundane career; then, with retirement, the nest emptied, the work taken over by someone else, and suddenly increased leisure, it becomes possible to return to that early interest arid to find a fuller self-realization.

Also, many creators recognize that diligent exercise of their talents prepares them to take full advantage of inspiration. Children are creative in a spontaneous way, usually without thought of discipline or style. That doesn't mean the style isn't there, or the discipline either. But often a considerable amount of self-sought discipline and hard training is necessary for creative work, as in musical composition, problem-solving in mathematics or physics, ballet dancing, painting, architecture, amid many other endeavors. Such work is generally directed toward an audience capable of understanding or appreciating it, while children's inventiveness usually is not. Thus a certain amount of maturation of the talent, and discipline in its exercise must precede its full expression. Since this also takes time, the complex, highly creative act can be expected to occur only rarely in childhood or before maturation has taken place. Still, creativity does show itself through a very wide age range, and it is not age itself that is important, but rather the time necessary for the full development of a talent.

Creators on Creating
Awakening and Cultivating the Imaginative Mind
Frank Barron, Alfonso Montuori, Anthea Barron

August 2012

The Story of Photography

“Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.” - Paul Strand

Photographs can function as repositories for personal memories, as historic documents, as political propaganda, as surveillance tools, as works of art. We think of photographs as fact, but they can also be fiction, metaphor or poetry. They are of the here and now, but they are also immensely potent time capsules. They can be downright utilitarian or they can be the stuff of dreams.

The photograph is such a familiar form of representation that we can often fail to realize what a complex and tricky object it is. We do not look at a photograph so much as 'read' it. We regard the world contained within it, but at the same time interpret it in much, but not completely, the same way we interpret the world itself. The photograph creates a discourse between us and the world, but a discourse that is never neutral. And even if the camera, even if the photographer, were neutral, the viewer is not.

Anyone can take a photograph. Not everyone can make great bodies of photographic art, but anyone can take a great photograph. To say that, is not to denigrate the work of the great photographers but it is the reason why photography is termed 'the democratic art'.

The story of photography revolves around what unites all photographers and all photographs. To discuss that is to discuss the essential nature - the genius - of photography. The author and artist John Stathatos, in an article on the tricky relationship between photography and art, asked 'whether the photographic image, retains an independent identity beyond its purely functional roles - does it, as it were, still preserve any specific and particular qualities?' His answer was that it does, thanks to the medium's 'unique relationship with reality, a relationship which has little to do with "truth", visual or otherwise, but everything to do with the emotional charge generated by the photograph's operation as a memory trace'.

A 'memory trace'. it is a shrewd expression, for it locates the photograph firmly within the realm of human experience. A memory, of course, can be as fleeting and as insubstantial as a shadow, but there are other kinds of memory, some of which, unlike shadows, are persistent, obdurate and enduring. There are fond memories, not-so-fond memories, repressed memories, false memories, shared memories, race memories, cultural memories.

Photography serves all of these - we photograph to support our own view of the world - but, as soon as the shutter is tripped, the resultant image reveals only that which is already past. The picture instantly becomes the subject of memory. Yet the photograph is not memory. It is only a trace of memory. And the photographic trace provokes the certainty that something existed, yet it is only a representation of reality and not reality itself.

Photographs are deemed to tell the truth, and we are always disappointed when the camera is 'found out' telling a lie, when it is revealed that a picture was 'set up', or an image manipulated in the computer. In these days of Photoshop software, the old adage that the camera never lies' seems to have been replaced by a new one, that 'the camera always lies'. But a photographic image is true and false in equal measure. All photographic evidence, all photographic reality, requires interpretation. The fact that the photograph appears to be a window on the world is one of the medium's greatest problems, and yet is at the root of its potency and its fascination. It is also the potentially tricky but potentially fruitful area - between fiction and truth -where the best photographs, and the best photographers, work.

Whether or not you regard the photograph as absolute truth or absolute fiction, its basic faculty remains. A photograph takes you there. If it does nothing else in terms of artistry, or any other characteristic by which we might judge it, that is, when you think about it, amazing.

Photography takes you there, not just in a geographical but also in a temporal sense. It is a time machine, especially where people are concerned. A photograph is capable of projecting us into visual contact with the physiognomy of someone at the furthest end of the earth, or a human being who no longer exists. Photography has taken us to the moon, and to the depths of the ocean. That is powerful stuff indeed. A photograph brings us into direct contact with time past, and it transcends geographical and physical boundaries, it puts us into immediate touch with the long ago and far away, with the quick and the dead.

Photography has been used to make significant works of art. The medium has been one of the primary forces in shaping the myths, manners and morals of our contemporary civilization. But in essence it boils down to pointing a camera at the world and clicking the shutter. As Walker Evans, one of the greatest of photographers said, most photography is driven by 'a simple desire to recognize and to boast'.

The Genius of Photography
Gerry Badger

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You Are What You Love

“Art is theft.” - Picasso.

When people call something "original," nine out often times they just don't know the references or the original sources involved. What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original. Some people find this idea depressing, but it fills me with hope. As the French writer André Gide put it, "Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again."

If we're free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it. Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas. Just as you have a familial genealogy, you also have a genealogy of ideas. You don't get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and can pick the movies you see.

You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, "We are shaped and fashioned by what we love."

The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there's a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.

There's an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income. I think the same thing is true of our idea incomes. You're only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with. Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.

Director Jim Jarmusch sums it up nicely by saying: "Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic."

Steal Like An Artist
Austin Kleon

June 2012

Truthful Expression

“An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.” -Jean Cocteau

Art is by nature self-explanatory. We call it art precisely because of its sufficiency. Its vivid detail and overall cohesion give it a clarity not ordinarily apparent in the rest of life. And so if the audience lives in the same time and culture as does the artist, and if the audience is familiar with the history of the medium, there is no need to append to art a preface or other secondary apparatus.

Photographers are so often asked to spell out the significance of their pictures, something they resist trying to do. Yes, they can say a little about what brought them to begin, though this is not to discuss what resulted, and they can describe the equipment they used and the processes they followed, but they know that if these are the secrets then the pictures are not very important.

The frequency with which photographers are called upon to talk about their pictures is possibly related to the apparent straightforwardness of their work. Photographers look like they just record what confronts them - as is. Shouldn't they be expected to compensate for this woodenness by telling us what escaped outside the frame and by explaining why they chose their subject? The assumption is wrong, of course, but an audience that knows better is small, certainly smaller than for painting. Photographers envy painters because they are usually allowed to get by with gnomic utterances or even silence, something permitted them perhaps because they seem to address their audience more subjectively, leaving it more certain about what the artist intended.

Years ago when I began to enjoy photographs I was struck by the fact that I did not have to read photographers' statements in order to love the pictures. Sometimes remarks about the profession by people like Stieglitz and Weston were inspiring, but almost nothing they said about specific pictures enriched my experience of those pictures.

Photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision. Other ways are relatively imprecise and incomplete. Why try the other ways? As Charles Demuth said, "I have been urged, to write about my paintings…Why? Haven't I, in a way, painted them?” Or as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, "You want me to say it worse?”

Photographers are like other artists too in being reticent because they are afraid that self-analysis will get in the way of making more art. They never fully know how they got the good pictures that they have, but they suspect that a certain innocence may have been necessary.

The main reason that artists don't willingly describe or explain what they produce is that the minute they do so they've admitted failure. Words are proof that the vision they had is not fully there in the picture. Characterizing in words what they thought they'd shown is an acknowledgment that the photograph is unclear - that it is not art.

C S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print...without words.

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect - a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.

Why People Photograph
Robert Adams

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Rethinking Thinking

“Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it. For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving full realization of this find. What we imagine does not necessarily take on a concrete form and may remain in a state of virtuality, whereas invention is not conceivable apart from its actually being worked out.

Thus, what concerns us here is not imagination in itself, but rather creative imagination: the faculty that helps us pass from the level of conception to the level of realization.”

-Igor Stravinsky, The Poetics of Music

Everyone thinks, but not everyone thinks equally well. For real intellectual feasts we depend on master chefs who have learned to mix and blend and savor an entire range of mental ingredients. It's not that what they do in the kitchen is any different from what we do, they just do it better. We like to suppose master chefs were born that way, yet even the most promising individuals spend years in training. It follows that we, too, can learn the tools of the trade and thereby improve our own mental cooking. This process, however, requires us to rethink what gourmet intellection is all about. And rethinking shifts our educational focus from what to think to how to think in the most productive ways possible.

Our tour of mental cookery begins in the kitchen of the mind, where ideas are marinated, stewed, braised, beaten, baked, and whipped into shape. Just as real chefs surprise us by throwing in a pinch of this and a handful of something else, the kitchens of the creative imagination are full of unexpected practices. Great ideas arise in the strangest ways and are blended from the oddest ingredients. What goes into the recipes often bears no resemblance to the finished dish. Sometimes the master mental chef can't even explain how she knows that her dish will be tasty. She just has a gut feeling that this imagined mixture of ingredients will yield a delicious surprise.

To think creatively is first to feel. The desire to understand must be whipped together with sensual and emotional feelings and blended with intellect to yield imaginative insight. Creative thinking and expression in every discipline are born of intuition and emotion. Artists are characterized as mainly visual thinkers but draw only partially upon visual stimuli. Emotions, kinesthetic feelings, philosophy, life itself, are other sources of artistic ideas.

Painter Bridget Riley describes her paintings as "intimate dialogue[s] between my total being and the visual agents which constitute the medium...I have always tried to realize visual and emotional energies simultaneously from the medium. My paintings are, of course, concerned with generating visual sensations, but certainly not to the exclusion of emotion. One of my aims is that these two responses shall be experienced as one and the same."

Whether we are attempting to understand ourselves, other people, or some aspect of nature, it is imperative that we learn to use the feelings, emotions, and intuitions that are the bases of the creative imagination. That is the whole point of gourmet thinking.

Josef Albers may have expressed this process most succinctly when he wrote that art is "the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect ... [a] visual formulation of our reaction to life.

Georgia O'Keeffe wrote, "I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at, not copy it."

Sparks of Genius. The 13 Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People.
Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein

April 2012

Perfume

There are pictures that may not only possess an astonishing graphic presence, due to some uncommon element or strange composition, but that may also radiate a unique atmosphere of their own, one that stays with you and that leaves an important imprint in your mind. I think of photos by Edouard Boubat, by BrassaI, Cartier- Bresson. These all have an extraordinary power and are stamped in the mind, my mind. They all touch an extremely sensitive chord. But how are they made? There isn't any law to describe them…an image whose contents possess the magic power of remembrance or memorialisation.

This does not happen just by saying that there is an encounter with the setting, a meeting with the people. There is light too. These images are pictures that, for me, have a kind of perfume. They stay near like a little tune that annoys you because you whistle it all the time. You can't disentangle yourself from them. I can't remember who said that "to describe is to kill, to suggest is to give life." This, I think, is the key.

You have to let the person who will look at the picture walk along that visual path for himself. We must always remember that a picture is also made up of the person who looks at it. This is very, very important. Maybe this is the reason behind these photos that haunt me and that haunt many people as well. It is about that walk that one takes with the picture when experiencing it. I think that this is what counts. One must let the viewer extricate himself, free himself for the journey. You offer the seed and then the viewer grows it inside himself. For a long time I thought that I had to give the entire story to my audience. I was wrong.

November 1977
Robert Doisneau

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Creative Ecology

“Guidance comes to us most clearly in solitude. It is called 'the still, small voice' because we must quiet our minds and our lives enough to hear it....Increasing and regularizing our times of solitude and quiet increases our ability to receive guidance.” - Julia Cameron

The Nature of Creativity
Questions and (maybe) Answers. Part IV

Like all phenomena of nature, creativity lives and dies within an ecology. There are creatogenic ecologies, but there are also creatopathic ones; the former are favorable to creativity, generative, while the latter are pathological and destructive. In all ecologies, periods of relative stability alternate with instabilities. Whether stable or unstable, heterogeneous or homogeneous, a creative human ecology is made up of a multiplicity of natural phenomena, people, experiences, and actions.

The specifically creative ecology may extend backward in time as well as laterally in space. We may find inspiration in the work of our predecessors from other ages, or colleagues in other locations. The Renaissance drew heavily on the golden age of Greece, and we still draw heavily on both. Modern art has roots in the work of artists in other cultures, from Africa to Asia. The creative ecology is both here and now, and long ago and far away.

Friendships are an important part of creative human ecologies. Think how many artistic arid intellectual movements have begun in cafes, with friends pondering problems, outlining constraints and possibilities, and embarking on a collective journey of exploration.

Almost all creation is a collaboration. Many of the most creative activities that have blossomed in this century, whether movie making or musical performance in jazz and pop bands, the development of business ventures, or new social movements, required constant collaboration.

As in all creative phenomena, the relationship between the creative person, the creative product, and the environment is full of seeming paradox. Creative persons benefit from support, from encouragement, from even a lone voice backing them in the face of adversity. Many creative persons have benefited from mentors, role models who guide them along the way to developing their own uniqueness. And yet the creative mind also needs a degree of solitude to match its immersion in the world, a time to mull things over and get down to the work of composing, painting, or writing alone. In that solitude we are perhaps never totally alone, wrestling as we are with ideas, debates, beliefs, and the notions of others. But in that solitude we can shape them, reorganize them, work with them, digest them, and make them our own.

So here again we find the constantly paradoxical nature of creativity, for as they internalize the work of others-their mentors, colleagues, friends, and enemies - creative persons are also developing their individual view of the world. In effect their own artistic voice.

Creators on Creating - Awakening and Cultivating the Imaginative Mind
Frank Barron, Alfonso Montuori, Anthea Barron

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Open

We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode. Not that the closed mode cannot be helpful. If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time for considering alternative strategies. When you charge the enemy machine-gun post, don't waste energy trying to see the funny side of it. Do it in the "closed" mode. But the moment the action is over, try to return to the "open" mode-to open your mind again to all the feedback from our action that enables us to tell whether the action has been successful, or whether further action is need to improve on what we have done. In other words, we must return to the open mode, because in that mode we are the most aware, most receptive, most creative, and therefore at our most intelligent.

John Cleese

March 2012

A Little Dream

Photography, for me, is a supreme moment captured with a single shot. It appears to be an easy activity; in fact, it is a varied and ambiguous process in which the only common denominator among its practitioners is their instrument.

For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant, which - in visual terms - questions and decides simultaneously. As far as I am concerned, taking photographs is a means of understanding, which cannot be separated from other means of understanding. It is putting one’s head, one’s eye and one’s heart on the same axis. In order to give meaning to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what one frames through the viewfinder.

My exceptional photographs continue to be rare. In all my photo essays I am always looking for a unique photo, the exceptional one that could he looked at for more than a few seconds. It takes a great deal of milk to make a little cream.

I have never been interested in the documentary aspect of photography except as a poetic expression. Only the photograph that springs from life is of interest to me. The joy of looking, sensitivity, sensuality, imagination, all that one takes to heart, come together in the viewfinder of a camera. That joy will exist for me forever.

November 1977
Henri Cartier-Bresson

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Creative Inheritance

“Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you. The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.” - Richard Bach

The Nature of Creativity
Questions and (maybe) Answers. Part III

3. Is Creativity Inherited?

Everything is getting to be inherited these days. Advances in the science of genetics, with more promised, have big implications for both the understanding and the control of the human design. Not only are the causal genes of many diseases and of psychopathology being specified, but the day is getting closer when the human genome, the entire genetic complement of humanity, may be mapped.

Meanwhile there is the more mundane meaning of inherited to consider. It has two main and significantly different meanings. Webster's Dictionary gives one as "passed down from predecessors," mechanism not suggested. The other is: "transmitted genetically or biologically from generation to generation." In both these senses, is creativity inherited?

In the DNA sense of the term, there is very little evidence of a significant genetic factor in the inheritance of creativity, especially when quantitative test measures of creativity are used. In brief, the psychometric evidence suggests a qualified no. Identical twins do correlate highly with one another on virtually all measures of intelligence and creativity, but when it comes to creativity alone, so do fraternal twins to almost the same degree. Twins aside, when families are studied over several generations, it does seem that there are certain family lines in which creativity "runs." It appears likely that a mix of genes and environments indeed affects creativity. A family is an enveloping environment as well as an envelope of similar genes. And then there is the great world outside, where we are on our own. In creativity as in many other traits, genetic influences are very difficult to separate from environmental ones. My personal preference is to put aside genetic differences, if any, and to look to environments. The history of culture reveals a stream of connected and evolving consciousness. Ideas evolve; cultures evolve and environments can be the transmitters of values, insights and opportunities.

Creators on Creating - Awakening and Cultivating the Imaginative Mind
Frank Barron, Alfonso Montuori, Anthea Barron

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The Voice

“I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual productsd” - Marcel Duchamp

THE CONDITIONS FOR FLOW IN CREATIVITY.

Creativity involves the production of novelty. The process of discovery involved in creating something new appears to be one of the most enjoyable activities any human can be involved in. In fact, it is easy to recognize the conditions of flow in the accounts highly creative people, as they describe how it feels to do the sort of things they do.

The Clarity of Goals: In certain conditions, the creative process begins with the goal of solving a problem that is given to the person by someone else or is suggested by the state of the art in the domain. Moreover, anything that does not work as well as it could can provide a clear goal to the inventor.

For artists the goal of the activity is not so easily found, In fact, the more creative the problem, the less clear it is what needs to be done. Discovered problems, the ones that generate the greatest changes in the domain, are also the most difficult to enjoy working on because of their elusiveness. In such cases, the creative person somehow must develop an unconscious mechanism that tells him or her what to do. The poet Gyorgy Faludy usually does not start writing until a "voice" tells him, often in the middle of the night, "Gyorgy, it's time to start writing." He adds ruefully: "That voice has my number, but I don’t have his.” The ancients called that voice the Muse.

Very often this is how the Muse communicates - through glass darkly, as it were. It is a splendid arrangement, for if the artist were not tricked by the mystery, he or she might never venture into the unexplored territory.

Knowing How Well One Is Doing: The solution seems to be that those individuals who keep doing creative work are those who succeed in internalizing the field's criteria of judgment to the extent that they can give feedback to themselves, without having to wait to hear from experts. Many creative scientists say that the difference between them and their less creative peers is the ability to separate bad ideas from good ones, so that they don't waste much time exploring blind alleys. Everyone has both bad and good ideas all the time, they say. But some people can't tell them apart until it's too late, until they have already invested a great deal of time in the unprofitable hunches. This is another form of the ability to give oneself feedback: to know in advance what is feasible and what will work, without having to suffer the consequences of bad judgment. At Linus Pauling's sixtieth birthday celebration, a student asked him, "Dr. Pauling, how does one go about having good ideas?" He replied, "You have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones." To do that, of course, one has to have a very well internalized picture of what the domain is like and what constitutes "good" and "bad" ideas according to the field.

The Merge of Action and Awareness: But when the challenges are just right, the creative process begins to hum, and all other concerns are temporarily shelved in the deep involvement with the activity. Barry Commoner uses similar terms to describe the almost automatic quality of the flow experience when writing, expressing the feeling of merging action and awareness through the image of the flowing ink and the flowing of ideas. The novelist Richard Stern gives a classic description of how it feels to become lost in the process of writing and to feel the rightness of one's actions in terms of what is happening in that special world of one’s own creation.

Avoiding Distractions: Many of the peculiarities attributed to creative persons are really just ways to protect the focus of concentration so that they may lose themselves in the creative process. Distractions interrupt flow, and it may take hours to recover the peace of mind one needs to get on with the work. The more ambitious the task, the longer it takes to lose oneself in it, and the easier it is to get distracted.

Forgetting Self, Time, and Surroundings: When distractions are out of the way and the other conditions for flow are in place, the creative process acquires all the dimensions of flow - a deep sense of flowing along an extended present and the powerful sense of doing exactly the right thing the only way it could be done. It may not happen often, but when it does the beauty of it justifies all the hard work.

Creativity Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

August 2011

Mastery

“The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer’s understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.” -Edward Weston

The Dedication to Mastery.

The creative process involves a tension between opposites, and nowhere is that tension more apparent than in the need to balance freedom and exploration with the disciplined fine-tuning of our craft. Creativity is a gift, some say, but not a gift that survives without practice.

Talent always plays a part, but to get really good at something you have to practice. It need not be a practice imposed from without; the exercise of a talent gives its practice in it. The best way to learn to read is to read. The best way to learn to run is to run.

According to their own accounts, the great creators practice incessantly. They start early and keep going until late. Concentration, hard work, the learning of craft as well as art, dedication to the goal of excellence, and willingness to accept the mentorship of others all play a part in creativity that makes its mark.

There is evidence that if you break down creativity into its factors, ability in those factors can be increased by training. If creativity itself cannot be taught, perhaps we can create the conditions in which it can flourish. And creativity is in part a matter of attitude. If you place a positive value on the creativity of yourself and others, you will dedicate yourself to practicing it. But the right attitude alone won't do it. Creativity needs to be expressed through a medium, the knowledge of which is essential if we are to see our dreams become a reality. We must acquire the necessary knowledge, through study and practice.

This leads us to a paradox. Creativity, the sublime expression of human freedom, needs discipline and routine. It takes time and energy and organization to produce something great. But the discipline and routine of creativity do not have to be boring. Even our disciplined routines can be creative. They can allow our personal differences and idiosyncrasies to emerge. If we are to organize our creativity, we can make that organization itself creative. The two elements most important are dedication and the drive toward mastery.

Organized creativity such as we find in dance, music, product development, or sports, to give just a few examples, requires a lot of practice to develop mastery - the mastery shown by the team player, finely attuned to the movements and needs of colleagues, sensitive to motion and possibility, as they create opportunities together. In a sports team, as in an orchestra or a jazz ensemble, we find each player an integral part of the team, yet possessed of her or his own unique qualities-a mastery of collaborative creation.

At times creativity cannot escape from simple hard labor. Deadlines to he met, canvases to be stretched, scales to be learned and repeated endlessly so that our fingers may match our inspiration. The dedication to masters needs the mastery of practice, and the exhilaration of creativity is sometimes counteracted by drudgery. Yet the drudgery of practice takes on a different light when we see our plodding efforts turn into mastery.
Creators on Creating

Awakening and Cultivating the Imaginative Mind
Frank Barron, Alfonso Montuori, Anthea Barron

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Just Push Play

“Those who approach life like a child playing a game, moving and pushing pieces, possess the power of kings.”

Play With Problems: Having "the power of kings" means having mastery over a situation. This power comes from having an attitude similar to that of a child playing a game. This attitude allows you to play with the issue at hand, to "move and push" its various pieces, so as to find out what works and what doesn't. As artist Jasper Johns said when asked to describe what was involved in the creative process, "It's simple, you just take something and then you do something to it, and then you do something else to it. Keep doing this and pretty soon you've got something."

This idea is reflected in a print ad, which was created in the 1960s by Charles Piccirillo to promote National Library Week. The headline consisted of the alphabet in lowercase letters like so: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvvxyz. It was followed by this copy: "At your public library they have these arranged in ways that can make you cry, giggle, love, hate, wonder, ponder, and understand. It's astonishing to see what these twenty-six little marks can do. In Shakespeare's hands they became Hamlet. Mark Twain wound them into Huckleberry Finn. James Joyce twisted them into Ulysses. Gibbon pounded them into The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. John Milton shaped them into Paradise Lost." The ad went on to extol the virtues of reading and mention that good books are available at your library. There are several messages here, but to me the most important is that creative ideas come from manipulating your resources - no matter how few and simple they are. With this outlook, we try different approaches, first one, then another, often not getting anywhere. We use foolish and impractical ideas as stepping stones to practical new ideas. We even break the rules occasionally.

Have Fun: One of play's products is fun - a very powerful motivator. For example, Rosalind Franklin, the scientist whose crystallography research was instrumental in the discovery of the structure of DNA, was asked why she pursued her studies. She replied, "Because our work is so much fun!" Similarly, Murray Gell-Mann, the physicist who coined the term for the subatomic "quark" after a line in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, was asked to comment on the names of the various types of quarks - "flavor," "color," "charm," "strange," etc. He said, "The terms are just for fun. There's no particular reason to use pompous names. One might as well be playful."

Finally, the renowned chair designer Bill Stumpf was asked what criteria he uses to select new furniture projects. He responded, "There are three things I look for in my work: I hope to learn something, I want to make some money, and I'd like to have some fun. If the project doesn't have the promise of satisfying at least two of these, I don't sign on."

Change Contexts: Life is filled with ambiguity, and it is context that determines meaning. Indeed, much of creativity is the ability to take something out of one context and put it in other contexts so that it takes on new meanings. The first person to look at an oyster and think "food" had this ability. So did the first person to look at a ship's sail and think "windmill." And so did the first person to look at sheep intestines and think "guitar strings," and the first person to look at a perfume vaporizer and think "gasoline carburetor," and the first person to look at bacterial mold and think "antibiotics," and the first person to look at a trapeze safety net and think "trampoline."

Reframe the Situation: Reality rarely presents itself to us with clearly defined boundaries. Rather, we impose our own order on the world through the concepts and categories of our language. If we change the words we use to describe a situation, we reframe it and change the way we think about it. For example, is the beach the end of the ocean or the beginning of land? Is the cocoon the end of the caterpillar or the beginning of the butterfly? Is water the end of ice or the beginning of vapor? You could answer "Yes" to any of these questions. This shows that a thing, idea, or issue can be understood in a variety of different ways depending on how it is framed.

Turn Logic on Its Head: To open up your thinking, try looking at what you're doing from an "illogical" perspective. Suppose you're a teacher and ask, "What if I were less effective?" Perhaps the student would have to take more responsibility for her learning, which could lead to the development of a self-guided go-at-your-own-pace program. Suppose you're a basketball coach and ask, "How can I get my team out of sync?" The answer would be a list of unsettling things that the team could practice because they might have to deal with them in a game. Suppose you're a professional chef and ask, "What if I used less tasty food ingredients in my meals?" This could lead to ideas on how to improve the non-eating portions of the dining experience, such as the food's presentation, the service, or the decor. Doing the opposite of what's expected can also be an effective strategy in competitive situations such as sports, business, war, and romance. In most endeavors, we build up certain expectations about what the other side will or won't do. In football, for example, a third-and-long situation will typically cause the defense to prepare for a pass. In retail, you can bet that many stores will do a lot of "Back-to-School" advertising in late August. In politics, most candidates will mount a last-minute media blitz. Sometimes doing the reverse of what people are expecting (a quarterback draw play, a "Back-to-School" sale at school year's end, media saturation six months before the election) can help you achieve your objective.

Expect the Unexpected or You Won’t Find It
Roger Von Oech

Love

“If you don't love something, then don't do it. “ -Ray Bradbury

The Flow of Creativity.

Creative persons differ from one another in a variety of ways, but in one respect they are unanimous: They all love what they do. It is not the hope of achieving fame or making money that drives them; rather, it is the opportunity to do the work that they enjoy doing. Jacob Kabinow explains: "You invent for the hell of it. I don't start with the idea, 'What will make money?' This is a rough world; money's important. But if I have to trade between what's fun for me and what's money-making, I'll take what's fun." The novelist Naguib Mahfouz concurs in more genteel tones: "I love my work more than I love what it produces. I am dedicated to the work regardless of its consequences."

Another force motivates us, and it is more primitive and more powerful than the urge to create: the force of entropy. This too is a survival mechanism built into our genes by evolution. It gives us pleasure when we are comfortable, when we relax, when we can get away with feeling good without expending energy. If we didn't have this built-in regulator, we could easily kill ourselves by running ragged and then not having enough reserves of strength, body fat, or nervous energy to face the unexpected. This is the reason why the urge to relax, to curl up comfortably on the sofa whenever we can get away with it, is so strong. Because this conservative urge is so powerful, for most people "free time" means a chance to wind down, to park the mind in neutral. When there are no external demands, entropy kicks in, and unless we understand what is happening, it takes over our body and our mind.

WHAT IS ENJOYMENT?

State of consciousness. The flow experience was described in almost identical terms regardless of the activity that produced it. Athletes, artists, religious mystics, scientists, and ordinary working people described their most rewarding experiences with very similar words. And the description did not vary much by culture, gender, or age; old and young, rich and poor, men and women, Americans and Japanese seem to experience enjoyment in the same way, even though they may be doing very different things to attain it. Nine main elements were mentioned over and over again to describe how it feels when an experience is enjoyable.

1. There are clear goals every step of the way. In contrast to what happens in everyday life, on the job or at home, where often there are contradictory demands and our purpose is unsure, in flow we always know what needs to be done. The musician knows what notes to play next, the rock climber knows the next moves to make.

2. There is immediate feedback to one's actions, Again, in contrast to the usual state of affairs, in a flow experience we know how well we are doing. The musician hears right away whether the note played is the one. The rock climber finds out immediately whether the move was correct because he or she is still hanging in there and hasn't fallen to the bottom of the valley.

3. There is a balance between challenges and skills. In flow, we feel that our abilities are well matched to the opportunities for action. In everyday life we sometimes feel that the challenges are too high in relation to our skills, and then we feel frustrated and anxious. Or we feel that our potential is greater than the opportunities to express it, and then we feel bored. Playing tennis or chess against a much better opponent leads to frustration; against a much weaker opponent, to boredom. In a really enjoyable game, the players are balanced on the fine line between boredom and anxiety. The same is true when work, or a conversation, or a relationship is going well.

4. Action and awareness are merged. It is typical of everyday experience that our minds are disjointed from what we do. Sitting in class, students may appear to be paying attention to the teacher, but they are actually thinking about lunch, or last night's date. The worker thinks about the weekend; the golfer's mind is preoccupied with how his swing looks to his friends. In flow, however, our concentration is focused on what we do. One-pointedness of mind is required by the close match between challenges and skills, and it is made possible by the clarity of goals and the constant availability of feedback.

5. Distractions are excluded from consciousness. Another typical element of flow is that we are aware only of what is relevant here and now. If the musician thinks of his health or tax problems when playing, he is likely to hit a wrong note.nFlow is the result of intense concentration on the present, which relieves us of the usual fears that cause depression and anxiety in everyday life.

6. There is no worry of failure. While in flow, we are too involved to be concerned with failure. Some people describe it as a feeling of total control; but actually we are not in control, it's just that the issue does not even come up. If it did, we would not be concentrating totally, because our attention would be split between what we did and the feeling of control. The reason that failure is not an issue is that in flow it is clear what has to be done, and our skills are potentially adequate to the challenges.

7. Self-consciousness disappears. In everyday life, we are always monitoring how we appear to other people; we are on the alert to defend ourselves from potential slights and anxious to make a favorable impression. Typically this awareness of self is a burden. In flow we are too involved in what we are doing to care about protecting the ego. Yet after an episode of flow is over, we generally emerge from it with a stronger self-concept; we know that we have succeeded in meeting a difficult challenge. We might even feel that we have stepped out of the boundaries of the ego and have become part, at least temporarily, of a larger entity. The musician feels at one with the harmony of the cosmos, the athlete moves at one with the team, the reader of a novel lives for a few hours in a different reality. Paradoxically, the self expands through acts of self-forgetfulness.

8. The sense of time becomes distorted. Generally in flow we forget time, and hours may pass by in what seem like a few minutes. Or the opposite happens: A figure skater may report that a quick turn that in real time takes only a second seems to stretch out for ten times as long. In other words, clock time no longer marks equal lengths of experienced time; our sense of how much time passes depends on what we are doing.

9. The activity becomes autotelic. Whenever most of these conditions are present, we begin to enjoy whatever it is that produces such an experience. I may be scared of using a computer and learn to do it only because my job depends on it. But as my skills increase, and I recognize what the computer allows me to do, I may begin to enjoy using the computer for its own sake as well. At this point the activity becomes autotelic, which is Greek for something that is an end in itself. Some activities such as art, music, and sports are usually autotelic: There is no reason for doing them except to feel the experience they provide. Most things in life are exotelic: We do them not because we enjoy them but in order to get at some later goal. And some activities are both: The violinist gets paid for playing, and the surgeon gets status and good money for operating, as well as getting enjoyment from doing what they do. In many ways, the secret to a happy life is to learn to get flow from as many of the things we have to do as possible. If work and family life become autotelic, then there is nothing wasted in life, and everything we do is worth doing for its own sake.

Creativity Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

June 2011

That’s Not Logical

“If you don't ask, "why this?" often enough, somebody will ask, "why you?"   -Tom Hirshfield, Physicist

Where do you use soft and hard thinking? To answer this question, we should turn to the creative process. There are two main phases in the development of new ideas: an "imaginative" phase and a "practical" one. In the imaginative phase, you generate and play with ideas. In the practical phase, you evaluate and execute them. To use a biological metaphor, the imaginative phase sprouts the new ideas and the practical phase cultivates and harvests them. In the imaginative phase, you ask questions such as: What if? Why not? What rules can we break? What assumptions can we drop? How about if we looked at this backwards? Can we borrow a metaphor from another discipline? The motto of the imaginative phase is: "Thinking something different." In the practical phase, you ask questions such as: Is this idea any good? Do we have the resources to implement it? Is the timing right? Who can help us? What's the deadline? What are the consequences of not reaching the objective? The motto of the practical phase is: "Getting something done." Both types of thinking play an important role in the creative process, but usually during different phases.

Soft thinking is effective in the imaginative phase when you are searching for new ideas, and manipulating problems. Hard thinking, on the other hand, is best used in the practical phase when you are evaluating ideas, narrowing in on practical solutions, running risk-analyses, and preparing to carry the idea into action.

Logic is an important creative thinking tool. Its use is especially appropriate in the practical phase of the creative process when you are evaluating ideas and preparing them for action. When you're searching for and playing with ideas, however, excessive logical thinking can short-circuit your creative process. That's because the imaginative phase is governed by a different logic that is best described as metaphorical, fantastic, elliptical, and ambiguous. TIP: Remember, it's an illogical world. The glowworm isn't a worm. A firefly isn't a fly. The English horn isn't English (French) or a horn (woodwind). The Harlem Globetrotters didn't play a game in Harlem until they'd been playing for forty years. We name or refer to things not to be precise, but to grasp a sense of them.

Follow the Rules — Playing the revolutionary is easier said than done. One company president told me that his most difficult task is getting his subordinates to challenge the rules. He raises a good point. Why do people treat most problems and situations as closed ones with set rules, rather than as open ones that can be played with? One main reason is that there is a lot of pressure in our culture to "follow the rules." This value is one of the first things we learn as children. We are told such things as: "No orange elephants," and "Don't color outside the lines." Our educational system encourages further rule-following. Students are usually better rewarded for regurgitating information than for playing with ideas and thinking originally. As a consequence, people feel more comfortable following the rules than challenging them.

Challenging the rules is a good creative thinking strategy, but that's not all. Never challenging the rules brings with it at least two potential dangers. The first is you can get locked into one approach, method, or strategy without seeing that other approaches might be more appropriate. As a result, you may tailor your problems to the preconceptions that enable you to solve them that way. A second reason that the rules should be challenged is the "Aslan Phenomenon." It runs as follows:
1. We make rules based on reasons that make a lot of sense.
2. We follow these rules.
3. Time passes, and things change.
4. The original reasons for the generation of these rules may no longer exist, but because the rules are still in place, we continue to follow them.

Moral: Once a rule gets in place, it’s very difficult to eliminate even though the original reason for its generation has disappeared. Thus, creative thinking involves not only generating new ideas but escaping from obsolete ones as well.

A Whack on the Side of the Head
How You Can Be More Creative
Roger von Oech

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Creative Sparks

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. “ -Aristotle

The Habits that Spark Your Creative Genius. Part V

'Harvesting Spark Moments to Yield Stimulating Outcomes

As time progresses, we mature, learn certain rules, and become conditioned in response to boundaries imposed by our parents, schools, friends, and workplaces. Over time we start to adjust — sometimes positively, sometimes negatively — our creative swing for life. When we are most in touch with our creative swing is when we feel that wonderful euphoric sensation associated with being stimulated. These are times when we feel most alive and excited because we are acting and responding in ways that are automatically aligned with our creative selves — our creative genius.

Although it is natural for us to create and maintain our authentic/creative genius, like the game of golf, it takes practice. Practice helps us to establish the highly specific routines and rituals that are necessary for sparking our creative genius. In other words, if we don't make the time, spend the time, and work toward disciplining ourselves in being stimulated, the odds are that our creative selves will atrophy and diminish. Just as with any good fitness program or diet, the key is to adhere to a set of habits that allows you to come into full possession of your creative genius.

From one person to the next: Your creative swing is different from the next person's. That's not only okay, it is also key to sustaining your own unique creative genius. Your swing, or how you express yourself creatively, is the core of your creative genius, and stimulus is the catalyst that helps spark novel and exciting paths. This allows you to tap into and experience that which you were born to create. The important thing is to understand and internalize that all the habits are interconnected and working together to help you in your creative journey. Sparking your creative genius is based on how well you practice each habit to find stimulus, play with stimulus, nurture the sparks into ideas, take risks based on your ideas, and then harvest ideas into productive and flowing "swings" resulting in innovations or creative solutions that help you (and others) personally and professionally.

Stimulated! Habits to Spark Your Creative Genius.
Andrew Pek and Jeannine McGlade

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Truth

“The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” - Richard Avedon

Are Photographs True? Part II of II

Does traditional photography get closer to the truth than do painting and other forms of representation? Do digital images falsify knowledge and undermine belief in photographs? This discussion is sometimes called the ontological debate, because it has to do with the philosophic nature of the photograph — its ontological status (what a photograph is) and what follows from how one conceives of a photograph.

Photographic Truth

DIGITAL IMAGES: The introduction of computer technology into photographic practices is cause for alarm to realists because they see it as threatening the reality base of photograph, which for them is the optical and chemical relationship between the camera and what it photographs. If the photograph's reality base is compromised, realists fear that the photograph's truth value is weakened or lost altogether. For conventionalists, the introduction of computer technology into photography is not alarming, but merely a continuation of practices that artists and photographers have invented and used throughout history to make expressive photographs.

There is something special about the photograph's relation to what is photographed, even when that information is adjusted with Photoshop. By means of computer-enhanced photographic technologies, we can see distant planets, the inside of a beating heart, a molecule that is a concept, and we can move through buildings which have not been built. Scientists invested in scientific truth don't fear computer-enhanced images: they use them. These image-enhancement processes combine art and science to turn digital data into images of scientific value and aesthetic beauty.

Journalists are now widely using digital technologies and, as they have since photography became available, continue to rely heavily on photographs to report on the world. Credibility is paramount for journalists, and whereas they have enjoyed the assumed credibility and authority of photographs in the past, they are aware that the possibilities of misusing digital processes can undermine society's implicit trust in the photograph. With the relative ease of manipulating photographs through computer technology, their fears of false but credible and influential images being circulated are justified. Some digitized photographs presented and accepted as journalistic or evidentiary photographs pose threats to photographic veracity.

Two journalistic examples are now notorious. On the February 1982 cover of National Geographic, editors visually shifted two pyramids closer together to better fit the vertical format of the magazine; Time's cover, June 27, 1994, about the arrest of 0. J. Simpson for the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman, featured a digitized version of the Los Angeles Police Department's mug shot of Simpson. Time's illustrator, however, darkened Simpson's skin (dark skin implies more guilt than light skin?), to the outrage of many readers who interpreted the manipulation to be racist. The ability to convincingly alter photographs undermines image authentication in courts of law, the enforcement of missile-verification treaties, and other documentary uses of photographs.

In 1991, the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), aware of emerging technology that enables "the manipulation of the content of an image in such a way that the change is virtually undetectable," adopted the following principle of photographic ethics: "As journalists we believe the guiding principle of our profession is accuracy: therefore, we believe it is wrong to alter the content of a photograph in any way that deceives the public." The Nature Photography Association, however, does not have "any principle so strong," and instead embraces "poetic license." In 1996, exposés in the Denver Post and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer revealed that Art Wolfe fabricated photographs in his nature book, Migrations: "In about a third of the hook's images the wildlife — caribou, zebra, geese. Greater sandhill cranes-had been digitally enhanced, and some had been digitally cloned and multiplied."

Examples of manipulations of photographs prior to digital technology are plentiful in the history of photography. Manipulations of two kinds are available: altering the subject matter before photographing it to suit the photographer's purposes, and distorting photographic negatives or prints after initial exposures have been made. Renowned nature photographer Eliot Porter was a purist and was opposed to changing the environment to photograph it, but did uncomfortably admit that he occasionally moved a stone or feather or piece of driftwood to improve a picture. John Rohrbach, custodian of Porter collection at the Amon Carter Museum, showed a photograph of Porter hacking away at a cactus to get a picture of a roadrunner nest. Paul Strand was also a purist, but Rohrbach has prints in which Strand drew in manholes or etched out people to balance his compositions. In the 1970s, Ansel Adams began removing "random clouds" in Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, one of the most acclaimed photographs of the twentieth century, made within the realist, straight aesthetic.

A story of how one Life magazine cover came about is illustrative of the point: An editor in Manhattan imagined a photograph of a leopard and its kill in a tree backlit by a setting sun. "The photographer set off in quest of this vision, traveling the East African savanna for weeks with a captive leopard, killing antelopes, draping the carcasses in the branches of various (horn trees, and cajoling the leopard to lie proudly on the kill, a tableau that the photographer shot against a succession of setting suns."

Former Disney cameraman Tad Nichols told another story about working on Disney's movie The Living Desert, most of which was shot on a huge table, set up in a sound stage. For the film's famous sequence of lemming suicide, Disney workers bulldozed lemmings off cliffs. Brower recalls how Disney filmmakers made a documentary of a hawk killing a flying squirrel: "Assistant grip stands on tall stepladder with pouch of flying squirrels. Grip tosses squirrels — unpaid rodent extras — skyward one by one, as in a skeet shoot, until trained hawk, after dozens of misses, finally gels it right."

Criticizing Photographs
Terry Barrett

April 2011

The Right Answers

“But fundamentally, vision is not about which camera or how many megapixels you have, it’s about what you find important. It’s all about ideas” - Keith Carter

Look for the second right answer. Often, it is the second right answer which, although off-beat or unusual, is exactly what you need to solve a problem in an innovative way. One technique for finding the second right answer is to change the questions you use to probe a problem. For example, how many times have you heard someone say, "What is the answer?" or "What is the meaning of this?" or "What is the result?" These people are looking for the answer, and the meaning, and the result. And that's all they'll find — just one. If you train yourself to ask questions that solicit plural answers like "What are the answers?" or "What are the meanings?" or "What are the results?" you will find that people will think a little more deeply and offer more than one idea. As the Nobel Prize winning chemist Linus Pauling put it: "The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas." You may not be able to use all of them, but out of the number you generate you may find a few that are worthwhile.

This is why professional photographers take so many pictures when shooting an important subject. They may take twenty, sixty or a hundred shots. They'll change the exposure, the lighting, the filters, and so on. That's because they know that out of all the pictures they take, there may be only a few that capture what they're looking for. It's the same thing with creative thinking: You need to generate a lot of ideas to get some good ones. One technique for finding more answers is to change the wording in your questions. If an architect looks at an opening between two rooms and thinks, "What type of door should I use to connect these rooms?" that's what she'll design — a door. But if she thinks "What sort of passageway should I put here?" she may design something different like a "hallway," an "air curtain," a "tunnel," or perhaps a "courtyard." Different words bring in different assumptions and lead your thinking in different directions.

Here's an example of how such a strategy can work. Several centuries ago, a curious but deadly plague appeared in a small village in Lithuania. What was curious about this disease was its grip on its victim; as soon as a person contracted it, he'd go into a deep almost deathlike coma. Most died within a day, but occasionally a hardy soul would make it back to the full bloom of health. The problem was that since eighteenth century medical technology wasn't very advanced, the unafflicted had quite a difficult time telling whether a victim was dead or alive. Then one day it was discovered that someone had been buried alive. This alarmed the townspeople, so they called a town meeting to decide what should be done to prevent such a situation from happening again. After much discussion, most people agreed on the following solution. They decided to put food and water in every casket next to the body. They would even put an air hole from the casket up to the earth's surface. These procedures would be expensive, but they would be more than worthwhile if they would save people's lives. Another group came up with a second, less expensive, "right" answer. They proposed implanting a twelve-inch-long stake in every coffin lid directly above where the victim's heart would be. Then whatever doubts there were about whether the person was dead or alive would be eliminated as soon the coffin lid was closed. What differentiated the two solutions were the questions used to find them. Whereas the first group asked, "What should we do if we bury somebody alive?" the second group wondered, "How can we make sure everyone we bury is dead?"

Much of our educational system has taught us to look for the one right answer. This approach is fine for some situations, but many of us have a tendency to stop looking for alternative right answers after the first right answer has been found. This is unfortunate because often it's the second, or third, or tenth right answer which is what we need to solve a problem in an innovative way.

A Whack on the Side of the Head
How You Can Be More Creative
Roger von Oech

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Creative Sparks

“Half the failures in life arise from pulling on one's horse as it is leaping” - Julius Hare

The Habits that Spark Your Creative Genius. Part IV

It's a Leap of Faith

Venturing toward a path of creative expression and action, especially in the light of the workday, takes a leap of faith. Like any journey, this one has costs: We have to attach and associate ourselves with a particular idea, inspired notion, or desire. While the prize for achieving success and pursuing a creative spark may be great and holds great allure, when deciding whether or not to make the leap across the chasm between dark and light, the cost of failure is something that greatly influences our actions.

Creative genius requires bold energy and faith. Compelled by sparks of ideas and energy, we come to a point in our creative journey where it is necessary to take a leap of faith. With that, we accept that outcomes may at first be uncertain and dangerous. However, if we make the leap and relinquish our control for clarity and certainty and trust our instincts, we give ourselves a fighting chance to clear a path, rejoice in the experience of awakening our creative genius, and ultimately shine the light on other possibilities that will unleash it still further.

Venturing: The Oxygen for Your Ideas

If you are serious about making the leap, then you must make venturing into the unknown a habit. The irony is that while your creative embers will spark in your dark chambers, in order for you to realize the full potential of your creative self, you must create out, bring forth, and make known your ideas to others. Instead of keeping them in the dark, you must bring them to light. Plato once said that "you can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark but not an adult who is afraid of the light." When we decide to venture and attach to a spark and fan it further so that it may catch fire, then we accept that what creative expression needs most is the validation of light and energy from others. Just as oxygen keeps a fire alive, the input, reactions, and expression of others can and should positively impact the expression of the ideas that you have sparking within.

If you keep your ideas and sparks to yourself and never take a risk, their flame will eventually burn out, and if left uncultivated, all sparks of creative expression will ultimately become extinguished — certainly not the goal of a path toward creative genius. When we feel that burning desire to express our creative genius, we each must confront one essential question: Do I keep it silent and dim where no one can see it or do I let it come bursting out in hopes that it may catch fire and blaze a new path of adventure and possibility? If the answer to that question is yes, you will keep sparking and bringing ideas to the light.

Stimulated! Habits to Spark Your Creative Genius.
Andrew Pek and Jeannine McGlade

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Truth

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. “ -Jessamyn West

Are Photographs True? Part I of II

Does traditional photography get closer to the truth than do painting and other forms of representation? Do digital images falsify knowledge and undermine belief in photographs? This discussion is sometimes called the ontological debate, because it has to do with the philosophic nature of the photograph — its ontological status (what a photograph is) and what follows from how one conceives of a photograph. The differing answers can be grouped into two major theoretical stances, one realist and the other conventionalist.

Realist Theory:

CREDIBILITY AND PERSUASIVENESS: Regardless of what a person thinks about the nature of photography, whether it is more accurately thought of as a unique medium or as a medium of conventions it shares with other media, most critics, agree that photography is accepted by the public as believable: "People believe photographs." Never mind that advertising has taught us that photographic images can be marvelous tricksters: What we see in a photograph is often mistaken for the real thing. People have inherited a cultural tendency to see through the photograph to what is photographed and to forget that he photograph is an artifact, made by a human.

The assumed credibility of the photograph is due to the optical and chemical relationship of the photograph to the thing photographed, to its dependence on a mechanical device, the camera, and also its reliance on Western realism. Photographers are well aware of the aura of credibility the photograph has that other media of representation do not share. Lewis Hine (who used photography for social reform), stated, "The average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify" — but he was quick to add, "You and I know that while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.”

Paul Strand, a student of Hines's, believed in the realism of photographs but took the idea into an aesthetic direction, namely: the straight aesthetic and declared that the "very essence" of photography is "absolute unqualified objectivity." This position, in due course, was furthered by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and many others of the straight aesthetic.

A belief in the trustworthiness of the photograph was fostered by the news media — especially Life magazine in the l930s-l950s, when it was influential in society and in journalism. Gisele Freund, photographer and writer about photography, claims, "What gave so much credibility to it Life was its extensive use of photographs. To the average man, photography, which is the exact reproduction of reality, cannot lie." She explains, "Few people realize that the meaning of a photograph can be changed completely by the accompanying caption, by its juxtaposition with other photographs, or by the manner in which people and events are photographed."

Advertisers have long been knowingly using photographs because of their credibility. David Ogilvy encourages his colleagues in his book Confessions of an Advertising Man to use photographs: A photograph "represents reality, whereas drawings represent fantasy, which is less believable."

Photographs continue to be powerfully persuasive. Both Susan Sontag and Abigail Solomon-Godeau have commented on the credibility and resulting political power of the photograph in relation to American abuse of Iraqis held at Abu Ghraih prison in Baghdad in 2004. American soldiers, with personal digital cameras, took unauthorized photographs of Americans abusing Iraqis, and these photographs eventually found their way into the news media, creating international outrage and national embarrassment. Solomon-Godeau comments: "Appalling and politically devastating as the photographs are to the White House and the military, their authenticity is unquestioned." The belated release of these pictures has yielded what seems the unimpeachable truth (photography's original PR claim). Written reports of the atrocities, however, had circulated for more than a year and were ignored by the government of the United States before the photographs became public. Sontag comments: "Apparently it took the photographs to get their attention, when it became clear they could not be suppressed: It was the photographs that made all this 'real.'"

Conventionalist Theory:

Theoretician Joel Snyder is one scholar among many who disagrees with realist theories of photography: The notion that a photograph shows us "what we would have seen had we been there ourselves" has to be modified to the point of absurdity. A photograph shows us “what we would have seen" at a certain moment in time, from a certain vantage point if we kept our head immobile and closed one eye and if we saw things in Agfacolor or in Tri-X developed in D-76 and printed on Kodabromide #3 paper. By the time all the conditions are added up we are positing the rather un-illuminating proposition that, if our vision worked like photography, then we would see things the way the camera does.”

Ernst Gombrich and Nelson Goodman write about the history of art to reveal how different people in different cultures and time represent the world and understand those representations. Both Gombrich and Goodman argue that pictorial realism is culturally bound. That is, what was realistic for the ancient Egyptians is not realistic for us; and perhaps more important, our version of realism, to which we are so accustomed as convincingly realistic, would not be decipherable to ancient Egyptians.

Styles of representation, realistic and otherwise are invented by artists and draftsmen in a culture, and then learned by viewers in that culture. Styles of picturing are made up of invented codes that become conventional. Realism, for Goodman, is a matter of a picture's codes being easily decipherable, readily readable. Ease of information retrieval from a style of picturing is mistaken by a culture for pictorial accuracy because the viewers are unaware of the representational system within their own culture: they are too familiar with it to notice it. A style becomes so easily readable that it seems realistic and natural — it seems to be the way the world is.

Criticizing Photographs
Terry Barrett