January 2011

Desire

“We don’t make a photograph just with a camera, we bring to the act of photography all the books we have read, the movies we have seen, the music we have heard, the people we have loved.” - Ansel Adams

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

2. Are there some motives, as well as personality traits, found more often in people known for their creativity?

Yes, there is a characteristic motivational pattern to be found in the creative. One such motive is simply the desire to create! Sometimes a person recognizes creativity as valuable yet does not make it a personal guiding force or chief motive in life. "Let others create; there's a lot else that must be done, and I can do it." Certainly no one can find fault with such a laissez-faire attitude. All we can say is, creative people are not that way. They want to create, above all. Even when they are stymied by life circumstances - by lack of opportunity in their job, for example - they self-schedule to find a way to create in the future. It is a primary, and intrinsic motive.

As for personality, several traits stand out. One is independence of judgment, or the insistence on thinking for oneself. It often shows itself in resistance to conformity, or even rebelliousness against authority or the status quo. Without our creative dissidents, where would we be?

Another important trait, found consistently in the creative, is intuition. This is the ability to see to the heart of things, or to see beyond appearances. It is not logical; it may not even seem to be rational. Those crazy hunches that we get, are our intuitions - sometimes spectacularly right, sometimes embarrassingly wrong. The willingness to take the risk of being wrong and perhaps subjected to ridicule, punishment, or loss is another outstanding trait of the creative person. Such action does not mean we behave on foolish impulse, but to calculate the risks and then to take a chance. What on earth was Columbus doing when he set sail for the New World? Columbus is a symbol, whatever may have been the reality. As Herman Melville put it, "Who shall be the Columbus of the mind?"

Finally, some stylistic differences do tend to show up. Introversion is one style of personality that is a bit more often associated with creativity than is extroversion. However, there is an extroverted style of creating as well as an introverted one, and the differences are not so striking as to make us all want to be introverts. Even the same person may be introverted at one time and extroverted at another.

The ingredients of creativity naturally include originality - the ability to see things in a new way - and also a willingness to challenge assumptions (a facet of independence of judgment). The ability to make connections is also important. The traits of personality shade over into traits of cognition and motivation in giving a picture of the functioning of the creative individual.

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

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Creative Sparks

“If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug a camera.” - Lewis Hine

The habits that Spark your Creative Genius. Part III

Spark at First Sight-Attracting Stimulus:

We often find ourselves attracted to moments that all of a sudden spark our imagination. The light bulb goes on and we begin to ponder the implications - sometimes rapidly, sometimes methodically. Our heart starts to race toward a destination and usually unknown path that signals excitement. The adrenalin from the spark of a good idea starts our creative juices flowing. This is what we call the spark attraction phase. The moment when an idea, thought, or aha! has us lovestruck and our minds, hearts, and even our bodies feel that tingly sensation that says we are on to something - we're stimulated and we crave more.

Creative sparks work that way. For what may seem like a long period of time we may be infatuated with an idea or set of ideas and processes before we venture into a deeper form of commitment.

If the relationship between you and an idea is going to last, you have to form more of an attachment to it and have a say in it. However, having a voice and making a sort of public vow to associate ourselves with a given idea involves risk. To create and be creative takes courage, and it takes time to feel secure in fastening ourselves toward any one idea or another. Just because we are enthused about the aha! does not necessarily mean we will stay connected to it. However, when we do, then we are ready to advance our creative efforts to bring about success.

Advancing the Spark: Steps Toward Creative Action:

Even in the best of circumstances, ambiguity is a part of the creative sparking process. While we may be swept up in the attraction of a new idea or a new trend, let's face it, when it comes time to really commit, many of us get cold feet. How many times have you had a spark moment, come up with a brilliant idea, didn't bother pursuing it, and, just when you weren't looking, someone else put the idea into action? If this has ever happened to you, you know how upsetting it can be. It's hard work to advance our creative genius and the many potentially great ideas we have percolating and steeping in our minds. It takes a lot of energy not only to bring forth ideas, but to maintain them and evolve them to the point where they can become the next big innovation.

However, like anything we do, when it comes to producing results, if we do not add fuel to the fire, then the spark, the flame, will go out. That single committed voice could just as easily become a faint sound in the wilderness -especially if it is without other voices to support it. It takes a village of individuals to share in the creation process and help nurture and grow ideas - it's tough to go it alone. So, whether the ideas percolating in your mind are ones to grow your business or ones to grow yourself as you journey through this world, having a support system to help you keep them percolating goes a long way.

Creative individuals, people who make it a habit to engage stimulus and generate sparks to awaken their creative mind, make it clear that even with a support group, expressing yourself involves risk. But the rewards can be great once you have finally found something, some idea or notion or plan that you feel will have significant impact and that you are emotionally bound and determined to make real.

During the stage of attraction we are pushing ourselves forward but we may also, need the support and commitment of others to propel ideas forward. Seldom does a creative spark advance into something of value without the help of others. Creative ideas flourish best when others become committed.

There comes a time along the creative journey, however, when we involve ourselves completely and vow to stick with the development of an idea until it has taken flight. Once we have decided to leap forward, we are at the stage of the process we call advancement. This advancement is what propels creative action to take place - we are now on to doing what needs to be done to make these ideas/sparks real.

Once you dedicate yourself to your sparks, you can accomplish great things.

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

November 2010

Creative Sparks

“Preconceptions and knowledge really only get you to the edge of where creativity begins. Then intuition and faith take over, hopefully.” - Judith Schaechter

The Habits that Spark your Creative Genius. Part II

The Cycle of Creativity Begins:

Accessing your creative genius is not a linear process; it is cyclical and doesn't follow a discrete pattern each and every time. However, there are clear habits that we can develop in order to encourage sparks to occur and to fully experience our creative genius.

Attracting spark moments typically begins with scouting. Scouting gets you in touch with the world and puts you in a position to have spark moments because you go out and about with "new" eyes-looking at things differently, taking it all in without evaluating.

As we scout, we also need to cultivate our environment—the spaces and places where we seek, spark, and sustain our creative processes. While we take in the world and fertilize the soil where ideas can grow, it's important to also remember to play. To play is to experiment, have fun, and let loose in ways that help you to feel more at ease and open to possibility.

These three habits (scouting, cultivating, and playing) are all about attracting spark moments into our purview. At some point, we attach to these sparks and consciously decide whether or not we want to advance them into tangible ideas.

To enable tangible results, the habits of venturing and harvesting are necessary. We venture-take a leap-into unknown territory in order to advance our sparks. Venturing is all about being brave, taking chances, and taking a plunge into potentially uncertain areas of opportunity that at first may feel foreign and uncomfortable. Then we harvest the results of our hard work and ideas. We view harvesting as not only the consequence of your creative efforts, but also as a ritualistic and celebratory effort at sustaining your creative genius. The more creative outcomes we reap as by-products of exercising our creative genius, the more motivated we are to stimulate and produce additional creative results. Harvesting, like the other habits, becomes contagious when we exercise it on a regular basis.

While each habit is different, they are interrelated. The more you develop each habit in connection with the others, the more your creative genius will grow and consequently produce stimulating outcomes.

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

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Bringing the Exotic Near

“Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art. “ -Freya Stark

Sontag On Photography - part II

Bringing the exotic near, rendering the familiar and homely exotic, photographs make the entire world available as an object of appraisal. For photographers who are not confined to projecting their own obsessions, there are arresting moments, beautiful subjects everywhere. The most heterogeneous subjects are then brought together in the fictive unity offered by the ideology of humanism. Thus, according to one critic, the greatness of Paul Strand's pictures from the last period of his life-when he turned from the brilliant discoveries of the abstracting eye to the touristic, world-anthologizing tasks of photography - consists in the fact that "his people, whether Bowery derelict, Mexican peon, New England farmer, Italian peasant, French artisan, Breton or Hebrides fisherman, Egyptian fellahin, the village idiot or the great Picasso, are all touched by the same heroic quality - humanity." What is this humanity? It is a quality things have in common when they are viewed as photographs.

The force of a photograph is that it keeps open to scrutiny, instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces. This freezing of time - the insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph - has produced new and more inclusive canons of beauty.

Photographs depict realities that already exist, though only the camera can disclose them. And they depict an individual temperament, discovering itself through the camera's cropping of reality. Every portrait of another person is a "self-portrait" of the photographer, as for Minor White-promoting "self-discovery through a camera"-landscape photographs are really "inner landscapes."

László Moholy-Nagy's demand for the photographer's self-effacement follows from his appreciation of how edifying photography is: it retains and upgrades our powers of observation, it brings about "a psychological transformation of our eyesight." (In an essay published in 1936, he says that photography creates or enlarges eight distinct varieties of seeing: abstract, exact, rapid, slow, intensified, penetrative, simultaneous, and distorted.) But self-effacement is also the demand behind quite different, anti-scientific approaches to photography, such as that expressed in Robert Frank's credo: "There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment." In both views the photographer is proposed as a kind of ideal observer - for Moholy-Nagy, seeing with the detachment of a researcher; for Frank, seeing "simply, as through the eyes of the man in the street."

On Photography
Susan Sontag

October 2010

High I.Q.

“Creativity is about intention, expression, and choice... At once cerebral and yet visceral, it is what you think about in your head and what you feel in your gut.” - Randall Sexton

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

1. Is a high IQ essential to creativity?

Well, it helps, a bit. Try making a list of the ten most intelligent people you know, and then make a list of the ten most creative. How much overlap is there? (Be careful, of course, that the overlap is not just in your definition of the terms.) Maybe try it another way. Make a list of the people you know who are not outstandingly intelligent but are outstandingly creative. Ponder those lists for awhile; they will soon get you thinking.

There are some kinds of creative work that absolutely require high intelligence in order to even come to grips with the problem. Only when that point has been reached does creativity come into play (although sensitivity to problems is also an aspect of creative thinking). But often a modest IQ is quite sufficient when coupled with an openness to creative solutions. Our assessment depends to a large degree on how novel or how original we require a product or action to be in order to call it creative.

Measured individual intelligence plays a part, then, but not necessarily a big part, in creativity. And remember that intelligence is not a single substance, not by any means. An important consideration arises from the fact that intelligence is a many-sided thing, or, as the intelligence testers say, the structure of intellect is multifactorial. This means simply that it is composed of many different abilities, in a variety of media, and in chunks of meaning and feeling that range in size from the very small to the very large. It's not all words and numbers and visualization and spatial reasoning.

Creativity, too, is multifactorial, and not restricted to words, numbers, images, and spatial dimensions. A quick smile is gestural; so is a hesitant step. Both may be creative acts, not only for the persons involved but, should they occur in a play or movie, perhaps for many, many people. Great actresses and actors convey feeling creatively in many modes. A sob or a song may be the most intense expressions of feeling, using breath and voice, mouth and lungs; the entire meaning of human life may be in them. A painting is kinesthetic and visual and spatial; it may be as small and simple as a choice of color slashed or splashed on a canvas, or a dot in an empty space. But slashes and splashes may be complex as well as simple; it is not physical size but the universe of meaning, the gestalt if you will, that they signify.

Research has identified clusters of the many aspects of creativity: originality, fluency and volume of ideas, adaptive flexibility, spontaneous/flexibility, expressional fluency, sensitivity to problems. All these can be expressed in a variety of sensory modalities, and in units large or small.

Most intelligence test items call for a single answer, already decided on by the tester; but creativity in the world is open-ended, the solutions are not known, surprises big or little may be in store for us. We should not be surprised to find that creativity as measured by test proves to be only slightly related to measured IQ. And after an IQ of 115 or 120, there appears to be hardly any relationship at all; other factors of personality and motivation take over. These include the ability and motivation to work independently and autonomously rather than in a mindlessly conforming manner, a high level of general energy and particularly psychic energy, a drive to make sense of contradictory or divergent facts in a single theory or perception, and flexibility of thought and action.

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

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Creative Sparks

“The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.” - Auguste Rodin

The Habits that Spark your Creative Genius. Part I

While we constantly interact with our environment, our creative genius lingers in the background, waiting to be activated to produce creative expressions (style) and impressions (impact). For example, when a musician plays music, how he performs that music (tempo, tone, melody, style, and selection) is his expression, while the music he produces is the impression (the feeling and emotion) he leaves with others. Our creative expressions and impressions are the result of using these habits that we consciously nurture.

By developing our creative expressions and impressions through various sensing and action-oriented habits, we will naturally attract "sparks of creativity" or help advance creative insights on a more regular and high-quality basis.

We have identified five specific habits that work in harmony with one another to shape the anatomy of creative genius:

• Scouting forms the backbone of our creative anatomy. Scouting contains the essential orientation and energy we need to find, observe, and use to interact with stimulus and initiate the creative cycle we each possess. Scouts are always moving from place to place in advance of everyone else. A scout is a person who is observing, inspecting, and discerning what's going on in her surroundings in order to obtain information and generate insight. As if on a hunt, the scout is looking to gather fresh intelligence that will inspire creative action. Perpetual seekers, scouts love the quest and the discovery of where their journey will take them. They are natural scanners with a keen ability to either see what no one else sees or to see the same things but derive new insights.

• Cultivating is the habit of creating, growing, and developing the spaces and places in which sparks become possible and you are in a creative state of mind. Without fertile conditions, a proper environment in which to be inspired, your creative genius will not flourish and attracting sparks will be more difficult. To optimize your creative spark potential, you must first become aware of the environmental stimuli that work best for you. If you need inspiration, maybe listening to soft classical music will get your creative juices flowing. Or maybe you need the energy level that rock-and-roll can provide. Setting is also important. Maybe you prefer to be near water, or maybe a dense forest. Maybe all you need is a picture of a beautiful ocean to free your mind and let it drift into a blissful state of creativity. Or maybe a warm cup of tea and a well-worn leather chair will help you concentrate. You have many fertile spaces and places to nurture your creative genius. When you are motivated to cultivate these spaces and places, the sparks are unlimited.

• Playing represents a childlike state that helps us to feel at ease in "experimenting" with stimulus and maintaining a perpetual state of curiosity in pursuit of creative insight and spark moments. To foster genuine play, open-mindedness is necessary to help us move beyond our inhibitions and balance the occasions when "serious" or more reserved expression is considered more appropriate. Chances are, you are already playful. However, you may not fully and consciously integrate and cultivate your playful side as a way to stimulate your creative genius.

• Venturing is the essential habit of encouraging our hearts as well as our minds to make a leap into sometimes unknown-and often a bit scary-territory. It is through venturing that we develop nerve and decide to either pursue a spark of inspiration or not. In most work we nourish safe, secure, and clear actions that can be quantified, tested, and implemented. Work belongs to the realm of order and predictability, not whims, hunches, or possibilities. The many of us who experience and nurture spark moments and consciously look to exercise our creative genius often find that we have been taught to have very little faith in our ideas, and as a result, we find the habit of venturing a gamble, just as the word suggests. Very few are willing to wager their proven equity for big, new, fresh ideas.

• Harvesting is turning our sparks and ideas into something that is real and of value to ourselves and to others. Harvesting is where we yield and celebrate real results-those things that you can see, touch, feel, and experience that manifest as a result of all the hard work and energy of sparking your creative genius. Creative harvesting is not only making real the sparks and ideas you have come up with as a result of your creative journey, but also stimulating other possibilities. In other words, harvesting means bringing into concrete existence sparks and ideas and in doing so opening your creative genius to encourage more sparks. Ideas are like crops that represent the total yield of all of our creative energies and habits. Once a fertile and creative foundation is put in place through the habits of scouting, cultivating, playing and venturing, we are ready to begin harvesting our ideas into real results that more often than not will spark other new possibilities. So, for example, if someone has an idea for a new product that emerged through one of the other creative habits. such as playing, the development of the product and advancement of the product into reality is the act of harvesting. The more ideas we harvest, the bigger our bounty for stimulating outcomes will be. The process of harvesting completes the cycle of sparking your creative genius.

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

September 2010

Sweat Equity

“Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? -- photography. Once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can!” - Paul Gauguin 1848–1903

After an insight occurs, one must check it out to see if the connections genuinely make sense. The painter steps back from the canvas to see whether the composition works, the poet rereads the verse with a more critical eye, the scientist sits down to do the calculations or run the experiments. Most lovely insights never go any farther, because under the cold light of reason fatal flaws appear. But if everything checks out, the slow and often routine work of elaboration begins.

There are four main conditions that are important during this stage of the process. First of all, the person must pay attention to the developing work, to notice when new ideas, new problems, and new insights arise out of the interaction with the medium. Keeping the mind open and flexible is an important aspect of the way creative persons carry on their work. Next, one must pay attention to one's goals and feelings, to know whether the work is indeed proceeding as intended. The third condition is to keep in touch with domain knowledge, to use the most effective techniques, the fullest information, and the best theories as one proceeds. And finally, especially in the later stages of the process, it is important to listen to colleagues in the field. By interacting with others involved with similar problems, it is possible to correct a line of solution that is going in the wrong direction, to refine and focus one's ideas, and to find the most convincing mode of presenting them, the one that has the best chance of being accepted.

One thing about creative work is that it's never done. In different words, every person we interviewed for the book said that it was equally true that they had worked every minute of their careers, and that they had never worked a day in all their lives. They experienced even the most focused immersion in extremely difficult tasks as a lark, an exhilarating and playful adventure. Even if we don't have the good fortune to discover a new chemical element or write the next great book, the love of the creative process for its own sake is available to all. It is difficult to imagine a richer life.

Creativity Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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Heroic Vision

“The Real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” - Marcel Proust

Sontag On Photography - part I

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. Except for those situations in which the camera is used to document, or to mark social rites, what moves people to take photographs is finding something beautiful. (The name under which Fox Talbot patented the photograph in 1841 was the calotype: from kalos, beautiful.) Nobody exclaims, "Isn't that ugly! I must take a photograph of it." Even if someone did say that, all it would mean is: "I find that ugly thing ... beautiful."

It is common for those who have glimpsed something beautiful to express regret at not having been able to photograph it. So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

Photographic seeing meant an aptitude for discovering beauty in what everybody sees but neglects as too ordinary. Photographers were supposed to do more than just see the world as it is, including its already acclaimed marvels; they were to create interest, by new visual decisions. There is a peculiar heroism abroad in the world since the invention of cameras: the heroism of vision. Photography opened up a new model of freelance activity - allowing each person to display a certain unique, avid sensibility. Photographers departed on their cultural and class and scientific safaris, searching for striking images. They would entrap the world, whatever the cost in patience and discomfort, by this active, acquisitive, evaluating, gratuitous modality of vision. Alfred Stieglitz proudly reports that he had stood three hours during a blizzard on February 22, 1893, "awaiting the proper moment" to take his celebrated picture, "Fifth Avenue, Winter." The proper moment is when one can see things (especially what everyone has already seen) in a fresh way. The quest became the photographer's trademark in the popular imagination. By the 1920s the photographer had become a modern hero, like the aviator and the anthropologist - without necessarily having to leave home. Readers of the popular press were invited to join "our photographer" on a "journey of discovery," visiting such new realms as "the world from above," "the world under the magnifying glass," "the beauties of every day," "the unseen universe," "the miracle of light," "the beauty of machines," the picture that can be "found in the street." Everyday life apotheosized, and the kind of beauty that only the camera reveals - a corner of material reality that the eye doesn't see at all or can't normally isolate.

While most people taking photographs are only seconding received notions of the beautiful, ambitious professionals usually think they are challenging them. According to heroic modernists like Weston, the photographer's venture is elitist, prophetic, subversive, revelatory. Photographers claimed to be performing the Blakean task of cleansing the senses, "revealing to others the living world around them," as Weston described his own work, "showing to them what their own unseeing eyes had missed."

On Photography
Susan Sontag

July 2010

Why Travel

“Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.”   -Jean-Luc Godard

Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes-with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.

I eventually realized that direct experience is the most valuable experience I can have. Western man is so surrounded by ideas, so bombarded with opinions, concepts, and information structures of all sorts, that it becomes difficult to experience anything without the intervening filter of these structures. And the natural world-our traditional source of direct insights-is rapidly disappearing. Modern city-dwellers cannot even see the stars at night. This humbling reminder of man's place in the greater scheme of things, which human beings formerly saw once every twenty- four hours, is denied them. It's no wonder that people lose their bearings, that they lose track of who they really are, and what their lives are really about.

So travel has helped me to have direct experiences. And to know more about myself.

Travels
Michael Crichton

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Why Photograph

“Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.”  -Frank Zappa

I feel when one gets clarity on why they do something, they can do that task at a much higher level. While I think it would be hard to match the brevity and precision of Garry Winogrand's statement "I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs", I also think in her book, On Photography, Susan Sontag has some illuminating things to say that are worth pondering. Following are some excerpts from that book...

In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object; lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.

To photograph is to confer importance. There is a probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subjects. But the meaning of value itself can be altered. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power.

At first, the photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer – a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees; not just a record but an evaluation of the world. It became clear that there was not just a simple, unitary activity called seeing (recorded by, aided by cameras) but “photographic seeing,” which was both a new way for people to see and a new activity for them to perform.

Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of a photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of a rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.

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Why Create
“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” - Jonathan Swift

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives for several reasons. First, most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity. The second reason creativity is so fascinating is that when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes close to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life.

Creativity provides a profound sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future. Creativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation. All three are necessary for a creative idea, product, or discovery to take place. The results of creativity enrich the culture and so they indirectly improve the quality of all our lives. But we may also learn from this knowledge how to make our own lives directly more interesting and productive.

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 Rabinow 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.”

Creativity consists of anticipation and commitment. Anticipation involves having a vision of something that will become important in the future before anybody else has it; commitment is the belief that keeps one working to realize the vision despite doubt and discouragement.

A genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight, a lightbulb flashing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work. Some people argue that studying creativity is an elite distraction from the more pressing problems confronting us. We should focus all our energies on combating overpopulation, poverty, or mental illness instead. A concern for creativity is an unnecessary luxury, according to this argument. But this position is somewhat shortsighted. First of all, workable new solutions to poverty and overpopulation will not appear magically by themselves. Problems are solved only when we devote a deal of attention to them and in a creative way. Second, to have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong from it. We also need a positive goal, otherwise why keep going? Creativity is one answer to that question: It provides one of the most exciting models for living.

Creativity. Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.
By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

May 2010

Uncontainable Cuba

“When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order.”  - Aaron Siskind

At 60 miles an hour, unidentifiable objects whiz by regularly. At first I thought they were white bricks and then I thought perhaps those French blow-up sponges that you see advertised on late night television.

The South Autopista from Havana to Trinidad provided many sights that caught my eye from cane cutters (macheteros) lunching in the shade of their truck, to inspirational billboards of Ché and José Martí, but the mystery cubes had me stumped. We passed farmer after farmer gesturing towards the car with a wooden plank topped with these unrecognizable squares. Finally, we could stand the suspense no longer and slowed our micro-compact rental to ask, “Qué es?” The answer: cheese - soft white blocks of queso sold roadside in the midday sun.

Not surprising, because containers in Cuba are few and far between. They do not wrap, wrap, and double wrap as we do in the homeland of the safety lid and the zip-lock baggie. We passed a man in Trinidad selling cake under a bridge. I gave him a peso coin and he deposited a large slice, dripping with green icing, directly to the palm of my hand. (We later noticed the cake tasted faintly of bacon, a fact we chose to block out rather than investigate.) Our Havana hostess, Vidillia, the stoic and loony matriarch of Lorne’s Cuban family would always remind us to save everything; water bottles, film canisters, empty hand cream jars... everything would be re-used. Bottles and jars reappeared in the kitchen a day or two after their kidnap, filled with a variety of mystery sauces. With disbelief we were told that the local hospital used the film canisters for urine specimens. I am home two weeks now and still find my hand reflexively pausing above the trash when I am about to throw away anything closeable.

The spirit of the Cuban people also has very few containers. Quite normal, we found, to walk by a home emanating music and the aroma of rum and be warmly welcomed in for drinks and dance lessons. Socializing sloshes out front doors and open windows with a muddy line between private and public space. At 3:05, joyous, unbridled children, stripped of indoor techno options, flood the streets and parks. They have no reason to miss a moment of the sun. Lorne and I soon developed a radar for “niños and niñas” alerting each other to the faces we found particularly wonderful.

Neither did we find much of a container for the Cuban skill for living in the moment. Whether it was a walk along the seaside wall named the Malecón, or an impromptu salsa session in the middle of a public square, Cuban joi-de-vivre has a tendency to overflow, burst the dam and sweep you away as you try to stand idly by.

Juliet Funt

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Focus

“You cannot depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus.” - Mark Twain

The Depictive Level: focus (part IV of IV)

The Depictive Level Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus. The photographic image depicts, within certain formal constraints, an aspect of the world. The formal character of the image is a result of a range of physical and optical factors. These are the factors that define the physical level of the photograph. But on the depictive level there are four central ways in which the world in front of the camera is transformed into the photograph: flatness, frame, time, and focus.

Focus is the fourth major transformation of the world into a photograph. Not only does a camera see monocularly from a definite vantage point; it also creates a hierarchy in the depictive space by defining a single plane of focus. This plane, which is usually parallel with the picture plane, gives emphasis to part of the picture and helps to distill a photograph's subject from its content. There is a gravitation of attention to the plane of focus. Attention to focus concentrates our attention.

In the Mental Level, you see a mental image - a mental construction - when you read this page, or look at a photograph, or see anything else in the world. Light reflecting off a page is focused by the lenses in your eyes on to your retinas. They send electrical impulses along the optic nerves to your cerebral cortex. There your brain interprets these impulses and constructs a mental image.

Pictures exist on a mental level that may be coincident with the depictive level - what the picture is showing - but, does not mirror it. The mental level elaborates, refines, and embellishes our perceptions of the depictive level. The mental level of a photograph provides a framework for the mental image we construct of (and for) the picture. While the mental level is separate from the depictive level, it is honed by formal decisions on that level: choice of vantage point (where exactly to take the picture from), frame (what exactly to include), time (when exactly to release the shutter), and focus (what exactly to emphasize with the plane of focus). What a photographer pays attention to governs these decisions (be they conscious, intuitive, or automatic). These decisions resonate with the clarity of the photographer's attention. They conform to the photographer's mental organization - the visual gestalt - of the picture.

When photographers take pictures, they hold mental models in their minds; models that are the result of the proddings of insight, conditioning, and comprehension of the world. For most photographers, the model operates unconsciously. But, by making the model conscious, the photographer brings it and the mental level of the photograph under his or her control.

The mental level provides counterpoint to the depictive theme. The photographic image turns a piece of paper into a seductive illusion or a moment of truth and beauty. Mental models adjust to accommodate perceptions (leading one to change photographic decisions). This modeling adjustment alters, in turn, one's perceptions. And so on. It is a dynamic, self-modifying process. It is what an engineer would call a feedback loop. It is a complex, ongoing, spontaneous interaction of observation, understanding, imagination, and intention.

The Nature of Photographs
Stephen Shore

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Body Heat

“My friend has a baby. I'm recording all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant.” - Stephen Wright

Sparks of creativity often flow from new knowledge. Frequently it's information about things that are completely new to you. Sometimes, it's new facts about familiar things. And sometimes it's information about things that you didn't know you didn't know. This last category, usually filled with items that are silly and fanciful, can provide a platform for your imagination to jump from. So here I present the: "Things you didn't know you didn't know" section (or the alternately titled: "Trivia to win bar bets" section).

How Can Babies Withstand Higher Body Temperatures Than Their Supposedly Hardier Parents?

When adults spring a high fever, they are likely to be very sick. But babies often spike to high temperatures without serious repercussions. Babies' temperatures respond more quickly, more easily, and with much greater swings than adults'. Why? Our body has a thermostat, located in the hypothalamus of the brain. When we are infected by bacteria or toxins interfere with the workings of the thermostat, fooling it into thinking that 103 degrees Fahrenheit, not 98.6 degrees, is “normal."

With a baby, a 103-degree fever doesn't necessarily mean a more severe illness than a 101-degree fever. Babies simply do not possess the well-developed hypothalamus that adults do. Temperature stability and regulation, like
other developmental faculties, steadily increase as the baby ages. Fever is a symptom, not the cause of sickness. In fact, fever is both a bodily defense against infection and a reliable alarm. The first reaction of most parents to their babies' fever is to bundle them up like Eskimos, especially when taking them outside. Mother and father don't always know best. Fever isn’t really the enemy and shouldn't be treated as such. The body is trying to fight infection by raising the temperature. Swaddling the baby actually interferes with the heat loss that will eventually ease the fever.

Life’s Imponderables
The Answers to Civilization’s Most Perplexing Questions
By David Feldman

February 2010

Transformative Time

“I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”  -Garry Winogrand

The Depictive Level: Time (part III of IV)

The third transformative element is time. Someone saying 'cheese' when having a portrait made acknowledges unconsciously the way time is transformed in a photograph. A photograph is static, but the world flows in time. As this flow is interrupted by the photograph, a new meaning, a photographic meaning, is delineated. The reality is a person saying 'cheese'. The camera, bearing mute witness, depicts a person smiling perhaps a shallow, lifeless smile like one in a yearbook portrait or a ribbon-cutting ceremony, but a smile nonetheless. Say 'crackers' and the camera will see a sneer.

Two factors affect time in a photograph: the duration of the exposure and the staticness of the final image. Just as a three-dimensional world is transformed when it is projected on to a flat piece of film, so a fluid world is transformed when it is projected on to a static piece of film. The exposure has a duration, what John Szarkowski in The Photographer's Eye called 'a discrete parcel of time'. The duration of the exposure could be ... one ten-thousandth of a second ... Frozen time: an exposure of short duration, cutting across the grain of time, generating a new moment... or two seconds ... Extrusive time: the movement occurring in front of the camera, or movement of the camera itself, accumulating on the film, producing a blur ... or six minutes. Still time; the content is at rest and time is still.

The Nature of Photographs
Stephen Shore

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Mysterious Time

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” -Diane Arbus

After a creative person senses that on the horizon of his or her expertise there is something that does not fit, some problem that might be worth tackling, the process of creativity usually goes underground for a while. The evidence for incubation comes from reports of discoveries in which the creator becomes puzzled by an issue and remembers coming to a sudden insight into the nature of a problem, but does not remember any intermediate conscious mental steps. Because of this empty space in between sensing a problem and intuiting its solution, it has been assumed that an indispensable stage of incubation must take place in an interval of the conscious process.

Because of its mysterious quality, incubation has often been thought the most creative part of the entire process. The conscious sequences can be analyzed, to a certain extent, by the rules of logic and rationality. But what happens in the "dark" spaces defies ordinary analysis and evokes the original mystery shrouding the work of genius: One feels almost the need to turn to mysticism, to invoke the voice of the Muse as an explanation.

But what happens during this mysterious idle time, when the mind is not consciously preoccupied with the problem? Something similar to parallel processing may be taking place when the elements of a problem are said to be incubating. When we think consciously about an issue, our previous training, and the effort to arrive at a solution push our ideas in a linear direction, usually along predictable or familiar lines. But intentionality does not work in the subconscious. Free from rational direction, ideas can combine and pursue each other every which way. Because of this freedom, original connections that would be at first rejected by the rational mind have a chance to become established.

At first sight, incubation seems to occur exclusively within the mind; what's more, within the mind's hidden recesses where consciousness is unable to reach. But after a closer look, we must admit that even in the unconscious the symbol system and the social environment play important roles. In the first place, it is obvious that incubation cannot work for a person who has not mastered a domain or been involved in a field. A new solution to quantum electrodynamics doesn't occur to a person unfamiliar with this branch of physics, no matter how long he or she sleeps.

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

September 2009

Award Announcement

Lorne is pleased to announcement that three of his images won awards at this years Photography Masters Cup.

Lorne's image of the elephant with the clouds won overall first place in the Wildlife category. The image of the Eiffel Tower won in the Fine Art category and an image from Lorne's Jacuzzi ad campaign won in the Advertising Photography category.

About the Photography Masters Cup (from the Masters Cup website):

The world’s leading creatives nominate the finest color photography. The Photography Master Cup is a global online awards show recognizing excellence in color photography. This celebrated event shines a spotlight on the finest professional and non-professional photographers and is presented by International Color Awards.

International Color Awards annual Photography Masters Cup promotes the finest contemporary photographers to the world’s leading art directors, agencies, editors, galleries, curators, publishers, and dealers of photographic art. The program provides an international stage for established professional photographers to show their best work to important key industry tastemakers who can take their profile and reputation to the next level of commercial success.

Thousands of images were received from ninety-two countries. The nominated photographers were selected by a who’s who judging panel from the international photography community, including Christie’s (New York), National Geographic (Washington) and Fox Broadcasting Company (Los Angeles). The Panel reviewed the images online over an eight-week period. “The Masters Cup celebrates photographers who operate at the highest levels of their craft,” said the awards Creative Director Basil O’Brien.

You can view the 3rd Annual Winners Gallery online at www.photomasterscup.com.

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Frame

“Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”  -G.K. Chesterton

The Depictive Level: frame (part II of IV)

The next transformative element is the frame. A photograph has edges; the world does not. The edges separate what is in the picture from what is not. The frame corrals the content of the photograph all at once. The objects, people, events, or forms that are in the forefront of a photographer's attention when making the fine framing decisions are the recipients of the frame's emphasis. The frame resonates off them and, in turn, draws the viewer’s attention to them.

Just as monocular vision creates juxtapositions of lines and shapes within the image, edges create relationships between these lines and shapes and the frame. The relationships that the edges create are both visual and ‘contentual’. For some pictures the frame acts passively. It is where the picture ends. The structure of the picture begins within the image and works its way out to the frame.

For some pictures the frame is active. The structure of the picture begins with the frame and works inward. While we know that the buildings, sidewalks, and sky continue beyond the edges of an urban landscape, the world of the photograph is contained within the frame. It is not a fragment of a larger world.

The Nature of Photographs
Stephen Shore

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Great Art

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” -Pablo Picasso

Great art isn't subjective:

Beauty is not strictly in the eye of the beholder, a new study says. Great works of art appear to follow rules of proportion and design that have universal appeal, at least in Western culture. Italian neuroscientists showed images of Classical and Renaissance sculptures by the likes of Michelangelo and da Vinci to 14 volunteers with no artistic training, some of whom had never been to a museum.

Some of the images were altered so that the original proportions of the sculptures were slightly modified. When subjects viewed the pictures of the original sculptures, scans of their brains showed a strong emotional response – they were clearly moved. There was much less response to the sculptures with subtle changes in proportion. "We were very surprised that very small modifications to images of the sculptures led to very strong modifications in brain activity," researcher Giacomo Rizzolatti tells LiveScience.com.

He believes that the human brain may have a special attraction to images that demonstrate the "golden ratio," an eye-pleasing proportion of 1-to-0.618 that shows up again and again in art and nature. This ratio can be found in a nautilus shell and spiral galaxies, and in Michelangelo's Pieti and the Pyramids. When the brain sees these magical proportions, Rizzolatti says, it interprets them as evidence of great beauty.

Excerpted from The Week magazine Friday, January 4, 2008

May 2009

Blocking Creativity

“A creative block is a fear about the future, a guess about the dangers dwelling in the dark computer and the locked studio.” -Eric Maisel

The Five Fundamental Types of Blocks to Creativity:

Perceptual blocks "are obstacles that prevent the problem-solver from clearly perceiving either the problem itself or the information needed to solve the problem."' Typical examples include accepting as facts information that is really unsubstantiated assumption, recognizing that you have a problem without identifying the true underlying causal problem, coming to the problem with a set notion of what the problem really is about despite information you might encounter to the contrary, focusing on only a small part of the problem or too much of the problem, focusing on solutions rather than defining the problem, assuming that you can apply what works in one discipline to another when in a particular case it does not apply, information overload, and failure to use all of your senses.

Emotional blocks are those that "interfere with the freedom with which we explore and manipulate ideas, with our ability to conceptualize fluently and flexibly and prevent us from communicating ideas to others." Doris J. Shallcross labels these as psychological barriers. These are very common and often serious blocks. They include: the fear of failure, of making a mistake, and of risk-taking; the inability to tolerate ambiguity, having no appetite for chaos; being too quick to judge; the inability to relax, incubate ideas, or sleep on it; distrust; inflexibility; and negative attitudes towards new ideas.

Cultural blocks are those acquired when we are exposed to a set of cultural patterns. They are the do's and don'ts of a culture. They include taboos, the belief that fantasizing and reflecting are wastes of time, beliefs that logic and reason are inherently good while intuition and qualitative judgments are inherently bad, the belief that any problem can be solved by scientific thinking and enough money, too much conformity, the belief that it is not good to be too inquisitive, the desire for the safety of the known, stereotyping, and the belief that problem solving is serious business and that humor and having fun are to be avoided.

Environmental blocks are those imposed by our immediate physical and social environments. From a business perspective, the organization's culture is the primary consideration. If you have creativity and put it in the right organizational culture, then an organization will be innovative. The absence of either creativity or the right culture precludes innovation from taking place. There are at least eight areas of concern: organizational-strategy, structure, management systems, leadership style, staff, resources, shared values and organizational skills. Each of these helps define the culture. Among the more critical issues to a blockage of creativity and innovation are: the absence of objectives for creativity and innovation, both organizationally and individually; a rigid, mechanistic, authoritarian structure; no or few rewards for being creative or innovative; autocratic managers who value only their own ideas; an absence of training; no or little organizational support for creativity and innovation; no successes to build on.

Intellectual blocks result from an inappropriate choice of mental approaches or an unwillingness to use new solution approaches. Because of this, our ability to generate alternatives is limited. These roadblocks include using only techniques which worked before; over reliance on logical, left-brain thinking; reluctance to use intuitive techniques; and the inability to abandon the unworkable approach.

Escape from the Maze: 9 Steps to Personal Creativity
James M Higgins

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Solving Pictures

“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” -Buckminster Fuller

The Depictive Level: Flatness - part I of IV

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus.

The photographic image depicts, within certain formal constraints, an aspect of the world.

On the depictive level there are four central ways in which the world in front of the camera is transformed into the photograph: flatness, frame, time, and focus.

These four attributes define the picture's depictive content and structure. They form the basis of a photograph's visual grammar. They are the means by which photographers express their sense of the world, give structure to their perceptions and articulation to their meanings.

The first means of transformation is flatness. The world is three-dimensional; a photographic image is two-dimensional. Because of this flatness, the depth of depictive space always bears a relationship to the picture plane. The picture plane is a field upon which the lens's image is projected. A photographic image can rest on this picture plane and, at the same time, contain an illusion of deep space.

Some photographs are opaque. The viewer is stopped by the picture plane.

Some photographs are transparent. The viewer is drawn through the surface into the illusion on the image.

In the field, outside the controlled confines of a studio, a photographer is confronted with a complex web of visual juxtapositions that realign themselves with each step the photographer takes. Take one step and something hidden comes into view; take another and an object in the front now presses up against one in the distance. Take one step and the description of deep space is clarified; take another and it is obscured.

In bringing order to this situation, a photographer solves a picture, more than composes one.

The Nature of Photographs
Stephen Shore

©Lorne Resnick

March 2009

The Right Answer

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” -Scott Adams

In the ten year period between kindergarten and high school not only had we learned how to find the right answer, we had also lost the ability to look for more than one right answer. WE had learned how to be specific, but we had lost much of our imaginative power. An elementary school teacher told me the following story about a colleague who had given her first graders a coloring assignment:

The instructions said: "On this sheet of paper, you will find an outline of a house, trees, flowers, clouds, and sky. Please color each with the appropriate colors."

One of the students, Patty, put a lot of work into her drawing. When she got it back, she was surprised to find a big black "X" on it. She asked the teacher for an explanation. "I gave you an 'X' because you didn't follow the instructions. Grass is green not gray. The sky should be blue, not yellow as you have drawn it. Why didn't you use the normal colors, Patty?" Patty answered, "Because that's how it looks to me when I get up early to watch the sunrise." The teacher had assumed that there was only one right answer. The practice of looking for the "one right answer" can have serious consequences in the way we think about and deal with problems. Most people don't like problems, and when they encounter them, they usually react by taking the first way out they can find - even if they solve the wrong problem. I can't overstate the danger in this. If you have only one idea, you have only one course of action open to you, and this is quite risky in a world where flexibility is a requirement for survival. An idea is like a musical note. In the same way that a musical note can only be understood in relation to other notes (either as a part of a melody or a chord), an idea is best understood in the context of other ideas. If you have only one idea, you don't have anything to compare it to. You don't know its strengths and weaknesses. I believe that the French philosopher Emile Chartier hit the nail squarely on the head when he said:

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one we have.

For more effective thinking, we need different points of view. Otherwise, we'll get stuck looking at the same things and miss seeing things outside our focus.

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

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The Left Jab

“To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography and the dancers hit each other.” -Jack Handy Deep Thoughts

Sparks of creativity often flow from new knowledge. Frequently it's information about things that are completely new to you. Sometimes, it's new facts about familiar things. And sometimes it's information about things that you didn't know you didn't know. This last category, usually filled with items that are silly and fanciful, can provide a platform for your imagination to jump from.

So here I present the: "Things you didn't know you didn't know" section (or the alternately titled: "Trivia to win bar bets" section).

What’s That Sniffing Noise Boxers Make When Throwing Punches?

Listen carefully to any boxing match, or to any boxer shadow- boxing, and you will hear a sniffing sound every time a punch is thrown. This sound is known to many in the boxing trade as the snort." A "snort" is nothing more than an exhalation of breath. Proper breathing technique is an integral part of most sports, and many boxers are taught to exhale (usually, through their nose) every time they throw a punch. Scoop Gallello, president of the International Veteran Boxers Association, said that when a boxer snorts while delivering a punch, "he feels he is delivering it with more power." Gallello adds: "Whether this actually gives the deliverer of the punch added strength may be questionable." Robert W. Lee, president and commissioner of the International Boxing Federation, remarked that the snort gives a boxer "the ability to force all of his force and yet not expend every bit of energy when throwing the punch. I am not sure whether or not it works, but those who know much more about it than I do continue to use the method and I would tend to think it has some merit." Donald F. Hull, Jr., executive director of the International Amateur Boxing Association, the governing federation for worldwide amateur and Olympic boxing, noted that "While exhaling is important in the execution of powerful and aerobic movements, it is not as crucial in the execution of a boxing punch, but the principle is the same."

But why couldn't any of the boxing experts explain why, or if, snorting really helps a boxer? Ira Becker, the doyen of New York's fabled Gleason's Gymnasium, proved to have very strong opinions on the subject of snorting: "When the fighter snorts, he is merely exhaling. It is a foolish action since he throws off a minimum of carbon dioxide and some vital oxygen. It is far wiser to inhale and let the lungs do [their] own bidding by getting rid of the CO2 and retaining oxygen." The training of boxing, more than most sports, tends to be ruled by tradition rather than by scientific research. While most aspiring boxers continue to be taught to snort, there is obviously little agreement about whether snorting actually conserves or expends energy.

Life’s Imponderables. The Answers to Civilization’s Most Perplexing Questions.
-David Feldman

©Lorne Resnick