FotoFocus 2016 Exhibition Preparation

Photography is now an accepted part of a university curriculum, but that was not always the case. By the 1960's and 70's, the medium had firmly established itself in art and design programs around the US, including those at universities in the Cincinnati Tristate region. I was fortunate to be one of the early professors in the program at the University of Cincinnati, along with Jerry Stratton, who founded the program. The other photography program founders in the region are Cal Kowal at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and Barry Andersen and Barbara Houghton at Northern Kentucky University. This year for FotoFocus 2016, Cincinnati's biannual festival of photography,

[embed]http://www.fotofocuscincinnati.org/biennial/[/embed]

the Behringer Crawford Museum is hosting an exhibition of photographs by us 5 Photo Founders, and it has been fun trying to decide what work to put into the show. I finally decided to exhibit photographs from my Masters of Fine Arts thesis show, "Dancing on a Wall", which has not been shown since 1983. More on the work itself in a later post, but here are a few images showing the final framing of the work, which will be delivered to the museum later this week. The show opens on Friday, September 30.

Tracking Family Connections

The project I am currently working on examining, in part, the connections among my various family members. It's fascinating to me that we all know each other so well, and yet at the same time don't know each other at all. What connects us as a "family"? A. Hope Jahren, currently a professor of biogeochemistry at the University of Oslo, recently published an essay in The New York Times titled

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/opinion/sunday/my-fathers-hackberry-tree.html?_r=0

"My Father's Hackberry Tree". In it, she describes a connection to her father that arose from her research work:

"...In 1993, my father collected hackberry fruits for me. My task that year was to observe the development of the seed over the course of the growing season, and I had earmarked several trees in South Dakota for that purpose. During a rare visit home to neighboring Minnesota, I saw with new eyes the fine specimen of C. occidentalis that graced the southwestern corner of my parents’ property.

I asked my father if he wouldn’t mind pulling off a few fruits every week throughout the summer, and he obliged. From May through September, he visited our hackberry tree twice each day, carefully recording the weather conditions, and also sampling, first flowers, then green fruits, then ripe, then withered, all placed into small plastic vials. Hundreds and hundreds of fruits — each week’s harvest wrapped in a sheet of paper describing its yield.

... (My) father spent the better part of his 70th summer observing a single tree, and in the end, gave me a hundredfold more than what I had asked for.

My father can no longer write. He is 92 now, and he cannot make his hands work. He cannot walk, or even stand, and he can barely see. He is not certain what year it is, but he is sure that I am his daughter, and that my brothers are his sons, and he treats us just as he always has...

When I visit him these days, we sit in the same house that I grew up in, but we don’t talk about science anymore. ... (We) talk about poetry instead...

As with many Midwestern families, great distances pervade our relationships — both literally and figuratively. We never really talk to each other; instead we box up our hurts and longings and store them for decades, out of sight but not forgotten.

... This year my father and I have spent (the summer) inside, reading...

In the fading light, we offer each other words that were carefully written by dead strangers, because we know them by heart. We also know that children eventually leave. Even when they do come home, there’s always the end of the day, of the week, of the summer, when they fly away to the other side of the world, off to a place where you cannot follow.

This month I am leaving Minnesota, and the United States, relocating yet again, to build a new lab and start over a fourth time. Compared with my previous moves, I am taking very little with me. The dead fruit of my early career has now been discarded. Instead, I carry in my luggage a delicate pile of paper. It is the small bundle of notes written in my father’s handwriting that I recovered from the box of hackberries he collected.

The notes are precious because they constitute proof — proof that my father thought of me every single day and must still do so. Proof that I am his, our shared last name written on every page. Proof that no one in the world knows that tree the way he and I do.

Our hackberry tree still stands, tall and healthy, near the western edge of Mower County. It should outlive both of us, growing stronger and greener even as we inevitably wither and fall. The tree will remain in my parents’ yard, and the notes describing what it was like 20 years ago will go with me, though its fruit will not.

I am taking with me only what I can’t live without, and the utility of these letters is clear. This collection of papers, filled exclusively with symbols and dates and botanical terms, is all of the things that my father and I have never said."

How beautiful that a collection of simple scientific data can make such a profound connection with a loved one. This task that was performed daily for a summer left behind evidence of that love, of the fact that the father thought every day of his daughter, and performed a service on her behalf. The notes that Jahren's father made say "I love and respect you." in a different way than the words themselves, and which is profoundly affecting.

Members of a family sometimes express attachment and affection for one another in such subtle ways that they can be essentially invisible or are not seen for what they are. It is this sideways approach to familial relationships that I am examining right now. What do we discover about our families and our selves when we look for evidence of love and connection in the less obvious places, in the places where links are there, but lie undetected? Trying to answer this question is requiring me to think quite differently than I have in the past about how to portray these issues visually.

Taking Risks in Your Artwork

Different people have different thresholds for risk-taking. Some find it easy to dive off a cliff into the unknown, while others hesitate before diving, and still others never take the leap. But there is a lot of truth in the axiom: "No risk, no reward". David Bowie makes the case for taking risks with one's artwork in this brief interview:

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNbnef_eXBM[/embed]

Someone said to me once that if you are willing to jump off the creative cliff into the unknown, you will spend some time in free-fall, terrified at what you have just done, certain that you will crash and burn. But it's important to remember that you will probably sprout some wings on the way down, which will ease your passage and provide you with a successful  landing. This has proven to be true for me most of the times when I have taken the greatest risks in my work.

I have recently started photographing people in silhouette, something I have never done before. It requires using the camera settings in a very different way than I am used to, and assessing the scene in front of me completely differently, too. It's aggravating, scary, and exciting all at once. I am impatient to get great results right away, which almost never happens when I start something new. That lack of immediate success increases my level of frustration. But working this way has pushed me out of a comfort zone that I hadn't even known I was in. And something new will come out of it that I otherwise would never have done.

Taking risks + being uncomfortable = Totally worth it

Piezography Workshop for Black & White Printing

My current project, titled The Thread in the River, is a mix of photographic media: film, digital, and video. I am creating a number of series, some of which are going to be printed in black and white. My Tears of Stone: World War I Remembered project was printed with  Piezography software and inks back in the early '00's, so I knew that that is the method that I want to print this new b&w work with. But a lot has changed since then and I knew that I needed a total reboot. So I signed up for one of the New Piezography Workshops at Cone Editions Press in East Topsham, Vermont, and traveled there last month for it. With participants from China, Japan, Canada and the US, it was a truly international experience. Throughout the workshop, Jon Cone, Walker Blackwell, and Dana Hillesland each filled us in on different aspects of the process, including information about how to prepare image files, how the software works, printer setup and maintenance, and far, far more. We were able to print on a large assortment of papers using 5 different inksets. They did a lot of one-on-one work with each of us, as we all had come there with different needs and agendas.

In addition, I got to see Cathy Cone's photographic work, which is gorgeous and evocative. At the end of the last day, we spent some time at the waterfall nearby, then walked back to share wine, beer, and stories. It was a beautiful summer day and a fitting end to a fantastic experience, surrounded by people for whom craft is important. For anyone who is serious about fine digital black & white printing, Piezography is the way to go.

Making Connections Between Music and Visual Art

I had coffee recently with cello-player-extraordinaire Nat Chaitkin. Nat plays cello everywhere in Cincinnati, it seems- with the Cincinnati Symphony, the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, and through his music advocacy program, Bach and Boombox, all over the city. Those facts do not begin to do him or his playing justice, though. Nat wants to change the way people experience and perceive classical music, and everything he does is geared towards breaking down the walls between musicians and audience. He tells his students to find the story in the music they are playing, for all music tells some kind of story. Figuring out what the story is requires imagining something that becomes visual. Conjuring up something visual, even if the story is only seen in the mind's eye, is something that visual artists can relate to.

Nat told me about an experience he had had at one of Cincinnati's street festivals with a woman who has synesthesia. Her form of this condition is such that when she hears music, she sees colors that change as the notes change. Nat ended up playing music in different keys, while she drew what she was "seeing" on the pavement with colored chalk. It is just one example of how music and visual art connect.

Here is Nat's full blog post about the encounter:

[embed]http://bachandboombox.com/your-experience-may-vary/[/embed]

Most photographers don't consciously think about how the sounds that exist in the environment in which they are photographing might affect what and how they photograph. This is too bad, because of course the sounds (and smells and tactile qualities) that surround us affect our experience of that environment, and thus affect the kind of art we make from it.

Nat's experience is a reminder that visual artists should try to remain aware of all of our senses as we create our work, and not just rely on our eyes or our brains.

Portraits, Self-Portraits, Cindy Sherman & Aging (Part 2)

My last post was inspired by a recent New York Times article about Cindy Sherman's  latest body of work. In it, she presents herself in the style of old Hollywood screen goddesses who are past their prime. Rather than looking sadly like they are trying to still look like their younger selves, the women that Sherman portrays have a certain dignity to them. They look like they are older. They look like they have lived a life.

Sherman states that this work, which came after a 5-year hiatus, was the result of she herself getting older and trying to come to terms with it. She says, “I, as an older woman, am struggling with the idea of being an older woman.” And apparently she is using this new series to try to figure it out.

Sherman is now 62, an age which for many is an in-between state — not quite still middle-aged, but not yet old-old. As author Gerald Marzaroti recently wrote of people that age: "You are milling in the anteroom of the aged." The fact that Sherman is professing that this series of pictures is more autobiographically based than her prior work is really interesting to me, as is the fact that her age is a driving force in making it.

Numerous photographers have used aging as a foundation for their work- Anne Noggle  and Lucy Hilmer are two who leap immediately to mind—and I, too, find myself very consciously exploring it in my own work at the moment.

I have always been interested in the process and effects of aging. For the “Shadowing the Gene Pool” series, I photographed young children and very old adults, marveling in their similarities and differences. I did the same in the “Birth & Death” series. In my current work, I am looking at my own body, how I am aging, what I think about it, and how I see myself as I age, in addition to looking at how others age. While it is not the only issue that my new work tackles, it is a big part of it.

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a column back in March that speaks to how being older can enrich one’s work. Here is an excerpt:

“…(People are) less likely by middle age to be blinded by ego, more likely to know what it is they actually desire, more likely to get out of their own way, and maybe a little less likely…to care about what other people think.

…They achieve a kind of tranquility, not because they’ve decided to do nothing, but because they’ve achieved focus and purity of will. They have enough self-confidence, and impatience, to say no to some things so they can say yes to others.

From this perspective, middle age is kind of inspiring. Many of life’s possibilities are now closed, but limitation is often liberating. The remaining possibilities can be seized more bravely, and lived more deeply.”

Portraits, Self-Portraits, Cindy Sherman & Aging (Part 1)

The New York Times recently  published an article on photographer Cindy Sherman that focused on her most recent work, which is being exhibited for the first time in New York City this month. Throughout her 40-year career, Sherman has made photographs using herself as a model. At the time that her "Film Stills" series was catapulting her to fame, she stated that these portraits were not “about” her. By this she meant that they did not contain any autobiographical content, and that the viewer should not expect to understand anything about her as a private individual by looking at the pictures. Up to now, she has always maintained that stance about all of her work.

But the New York Times article raised my eyebrows when I read the lines, "...she is now willing to see aspects of herself even in her early photos."

This shift is significant, and I’m sure will lead to much discussion among critics, art historians, and students of her work. Sherman herself attributes this change in her own assessment of her past work to the fact that she is now older (62, to be specific) and looks back at that work from a different perspective than she had when she was younger.

This makes sense to me. As we age, there is often a natural evolution in how we see ourselves. We look back at our own history and ask ourselves, “How could I have been so naïve/courageous/stupid/bold? Why did I do that? Why didn’t I do that? What was I thinking?!” and myriad other questions.

In the case of art, one of the most valuable actions I have taken in recent years has been to look back through my archives every once in a while and try to understand my older work in a new way. With the passage of time, new life experiences help me to understand my younger creative self better, and in different ways that were invisible to me before. I’m glad that I have kept a lot of my early work so I can study it in this way.

I would encourage any artist to do so. If you don’t have the space to keep a lot of original artwork, then keep what is most important/significant to you and digitize as much of the rest of it as you can. Looking at digital reproductions of your artwork is not even close to being the same as looking at the originals, but it is the next best thing, and certainly better than nothing. In this way, you can haul out as much or as little of your past creative history as you want, whenever you want, and learn from yourself about yourself.

The older you get and the more you have to look back on, the more threads you will find that connect the various bodies of work that you have done and the better you will understand your creative voice as it has evolved.

Why is Art so Unimportant to So Many People?

This is a true story: A few weeks ago I overheard a college-aged son tell his mother that he got into one of the two classes he really wanted to take in the fall. “Which one?”, she asked.

“The art class!” he replied, his voice full of excitement.

“I don’t care about THAT! I want to know if you got into the REAL class, you know, the math class!”, she said scornfully.

The gods of art- and I- wept.

Teacher Appreciation Day was a few weeks ago and numerous friends on Facebook posted about how art teachers are not considered to be "real" teachers. This attitude- that visual art, music and performance are not as important as other fields of study- is ridiculously pervasive in our culture.

I believe that this is, in part, because those of us in the arts have not done an effective job at educating those who don't already love the arts as to their value. When we talk about their value, we tend to talk among ourselves about it, which is like preaching to the choir. Or we talk about it in terms that don't speak to non-artists. We shake our heads in disbelief, but don't attempt to step outside of ourselves and make a concerted effort at educating others in ways that will resonate and stick.

How can you make a convincing argument to an engineer that making art can facilitate and enhance the learning of math, for instance? My favorite example of how this can be done comes from the way that Waldorf education approaches integrating the arts, math and science. Waldorf schools initially introduce math and math concepts by teaching young children how to knit before they put pencil to paper. In so doing, the kids are learning how to add, subtract, multiply and divide (stitches and rows). As they knit, they are doing mathematical equations in their heads and creating with their hands, which prepares them for learning how to do it on paper. The items they knit are beautifully colored art objects, of which they are rightly proud.

On a different educational level, a few years ago I read about Daina Taimina, the Cornell University math professor who knits and crochets objects to illustrate hyperbolic space to her graduate students. Her artwork is exhibited all over the world now. How she thinks and what she does is a perfect example of how art and science belong to the same worlds. And we artists need to get better at explaining and illustrating that in concrete ways, or stories like the one I told at the beginning of this post will just be told endlessly until the end of days.

The conversation we are having in the US about importance of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education should really be a conversation about STEAM:

[embed]http://steamedu.com/[/embed]

(Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) education. But until we artists make an effective case about the importance of art in relation to other areas of learning, we will never have a seat at that table and will always be considered expendable.

Work-Life Balance for Artists

Work-life-art balance - Is there such a thing?! My answer to that is: There can be, but it is a constant struggle to maintain it, and there are plenty of times when it is impossible. At least, that is my experience.

There are so many factors that one has to deal with in life: Work demands, personal relationships with partners/kids/family/friends, physical and mental health issues, financial pressures... I could go on and on. These factors will vary for everyone and change over time. For example, for the first 14 years of my career as an artist-educator, children were not part of my life. I found the work-life-art balance challenging enough, but then I had twins and everything changed.

Back in 2004, an interviewer asked me to describe a typical day in my life and this is what I said:

5:30am- Wake up, answer e-mails for 30 minutes, exercise briefly, eat breakfast, shower, start a load of laundry.

7am- While my hands are engaged in making lunch for my kids, my mind is scanning the entire day to come so that I don't forget anything. Good luck with that! It's also my turn to take the kids to school.

8:30am-12:30pm- In my studio wrapping up the pre-production activities for a book of my photographs that is being published in a few months. I’m on the phone with the designer, the copy editor, and the translators setting up the final round of proofreading. I’m also getting together a copyright application and an exhibition application. This means preparing digital files of the photos, filling out paperwork, labeling, addressing….

12:30pm- Work-related meetings.

2-4:20pm- Teach a class of graduate and advanced photography students.

5:30pm- Family time with spouse and kids. Includes making, eating, and cleaning up after dinner, and getting the kids to bed.

8:20pm- Grade student projects, prepare for upcoming classes, answer e-mails, and do some committee work.

10:30pm- The siren song of sleep is calling my name.

As you can see, my days were jam-packed full, with hardly any down time. But the above example also illustrates my first piece of advice for artists who are struggling to find time to make art amid the chaos of life and the demands of your job: Schedule regular time for art-related activities and make that time inviolate. Whether you spend that time on making art or preparing grant applications, etc., doesn't matter. What does matter is that the only way that you will find time to have art in your life is to make it a priority.

For me, that meant scheduling it- just like a doctor's appointment. If I scheduled time for my creative life and treated it like I did an important doctor's appointment, then I wasn't going to end up giving that time away. I ended up carving out a grand total of 8 hours per week for my art. Twice a week, 4 hours each time. Which, as any artist knows, is grossly inadequate. But it was enough to keep me going, to keep my hand in it. And because my time dedicated to art was so limited, I rarely wasted it.

Clara Lieu, an art professor and artist, wrote a terrific blog post on this subject titled:

[embed]https://claralieu.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/ask-the-art-professor-how-do-you-balance-a-full-time-job-kids-and-your-own-art/[/embed]

In it, she states: "Successfully balancing a full-time job, kids and your art is all about various forms of sacrifice." Whether you have kids or not, that is totally true. And there are times when one or the other thing will have to be sacrificed. For example, for the first three years after my kids were born, I did nothing art-related at all. Nothing. Because I literally couldn't. I was so exhausted from raising the kids and trying to do my job that I couldn't even think about art. As obsessed as I am about art-making, I just realized that I couldn't make it a priority at that time. But the funny thing was, I didn't care. I knew that that state wouldn't last forever, and it didn't. Once the kids were older and less labor-intensive, I started scheduling time for creative work once again.

And that brings me to my second piece of advice, which is that learning to say "no" is an important part of making the sacrifices necessary for work-life-art balance, and the sooner you practice doing that, the better off you will be. As described above, sometimes I had to say "no" to my art. Sometimes I had to say "no" to how much time and energy I spent on my job. Sometimes I had to say "no" to a social or sports or family event. What you say "no" to will vary, according to what life throws at you at any given time.

No one can do it all or have it all, all the time. Saying "no" becomes an important coping mechanism for keeping your energy and time focused on what your priorities are/need to be. I know that that's easier said than done, but it really does help.

Everyone has to figure out their own answer to how to create work-life-art balance for themselves. Keep trying out different approaches until you find something that fits your own life and then keep at it, until you need to make a change again in order to regain your balance.

Thank You, Prince

Yet another genius of popular music has died. The fact that Prince and David Bowie died within months of each other does not feel random to me. Two people who lived and breathed their art, always seeking for different ways to express themselves, both of whom marched to their own beat and who died far too young.

The New Yorker magazine published an article that outlined some of the many reasons for why Prince was so respected by his peers and fans alike.

And here is an excerpt from an interview Prince did with Jim Walsh from the Minneapolis Post:

“I am music. I feel music. When I walk around, I hear brand new things. You're almost cursed. You're not even (its maker), you're just there to bring it forth. You know, ‘Can't I go to sleep?’ No. You can't. But OK, now you can. And you go to sleep, and you don't hear it, and then you're lonely. No one wants to be on Earth alone.”

 He spoke for all artists with those words.

Walsh wrote, “…that’s what we mourn today — the loss of an eternal seeker, which all great artists are at heart.” Our world is left less colorful, less vibrant, and diminished by his passing.

Thank you, Prince, for all the gifts you gave us.

Artists I Like- On Kawara

Perhaps because I am currently working on a project that utilizes photographs that I have made on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis, I am intrigued by artists who have taken that approach in their own work, regardless of medium. On Kawara (1932-2014), a conceptual artist born in Japan, certainly fits that mode.  For 48 years, he would spend a part of each day making a painting that had at its center the date on which he was painting it (his "Today" series). Other creative methods he used were mapping the places he'd been, and  keeping daily lists of people he met. Between 1970 and 2000, he sent his friends more than 900 telegrams just to tell them that he was still alive. In the pre-social networked age that we live in today, that kind of thing would perhaps have labeled him as eccentric. Today it makes him seem to have been far ahead of his time. It's possible that, if he were a young artist today, he would have been posting a daily Instagram of each meal, sending weekly selfies on Snapchat (without showing his face, as he was obsessively private), and tweeting his whereabouts on Twitter. Taken together, his work creates an archive of his life.

In an article on Artnet.com, critic Ben Davis wrote that Kawara not only anticipated our data-obsessed age, "he offers an alternative way of thinking about it, a possible model for how to stay human amid it all."

That brings up the issue of the culture of sharing (oversharing?) of personal information in today's world. For me, the most effective kind of personal sharing through one's artwork is that in which an artist reveals just enough for the viewer to engage with, but which only hints at the deeper currents beyond. I like artists whose work makes me feel like I know them, at the same time that I realize I don't know them at all.

On Kawara's work does that for me. He tells us so much about himself and his life, but ultimately preserves his privacy and seems completely unknowable.  For his art wasn't solely about him per se, it was about the passage of time. By focusing on how that passage is built from incremental steps day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year, Kawara make us aware of our own inexorable movement towards the future, as well as of the past we have left behind.

The Process of Creating #3

I read a memorial piece on author James Salter in the New York Times Magazine recently. Written by Will Mackin, the final paragraph contains a wonderful description of what the creative process is like. Salter had been a fighter pilot prior to turning to writing as a profession, and Mackin was convinced that the experience informed how Salter wrote. Here is the final paragraph: "...you can sense Salter's search for the idea, or the feeling, or the mood behind the fictional moment. I see him sitting at his desk, as he once sat in the cockpit over Korea, staring out in front of him, a space that can be defined only by what's not there. He doesn't know exactly what he wants to say, or how to say it, but he feels its presence. As his search goes on, he may begin to doubt the existence of what he's after. But then it appears - in the case of an enemy fighter, "silent as a shark" - and immediately it tries to escape or to turn on him. He struggles to maintain sight of it, moving in close, so close he can't miss. And when he hits, something vital shatters."

I can relate so much to what Mackin was describing, as I think any creative person in any field can, for that is the creative process in a nutshell. Beautifully said! And... it makes me want to read James Salter's books!

Dear David Bowie...

Dear David Bowie, You have been on my mind a lot since you passed away two weeks ago. Not that you have ever been off my radar, but the event of your death has caused me to ask myself why I will miss you so much, now that you are gone. The author and journalist Charles Shaar Murray was quoted in the obituary that The Economist ran in its January 14, 2016 issue as saying: "I can think of no other rock artist whose next album is always the one I'm most looking forward to hearing."

And that sums it up in a nutshell for me. You were predictable in your unpredictability. I never quite knew what you would do next, and that sense of anticipation- of not knowing what was around the corner- was exhilarating. Whether it was in the music itself or the way you dressed and presented yourself to the world, there was always a feeling that you had discovered something before the rest of us and encouraged us to explore it, too.

Even your voice was unpredictable. It was unexpectedly powerful, yet it would quaver. As a friend of mine so brilliantly put it, your voice was "so striking because of the contrasting qualities of fierce self-assurance and bristling vulnerability." I sometimes would think that it wasn't quite in tune, but then it was. Where would it go next? I loved that I never quite knew the answer to that.

You were an artist who epitomized the idea that the best of art is based on a substantial foundation of knowledge and experience that is invisible to the rest of us, but which is necessary to produce your work. Always seeking, always curious, always telling us that it is normal to be different.

I will really miss you, Mr. Bowie. I'm so glad that you spent as much time as you did on earth.

Thank you for your art,

Jane Alden Stevens

Making Art Over Time

The Sunday New York Times Magazine recently published an interview with the British actor Charlotte Rampling, whose heyday was in the 1960's and 70's. While never completely off the radar, she has a powerful new film out titled "45 Years" that is bringing her a lot of attention. Now 69, she speaks in the article about what it is like to be the center of attention as an older actor, the nature of her career, and the choices she has made over the years. Here is what she said that hit home for me in particular:

"I wanted to make my life, not a work of art - I didn't think of it that way - but I wanted to create a visible continuity in what I did. I wanted there to be a thread I could follow and other people could follow."

That is exactly how I see my own creative choices when I look back over the course of my career. Without consciously having intended to create it, there is an arc of continuity throughout my work that ties it all together. The various series that I am working on now really point this out. My goal is to have some of this new work out in the world in some form by summer.

We'll see if life allows that to happen!

Dayton Theatre Guild Production

Many thanks to director Kathy Mola and the Dayton Theatre Guild for their thoughtful and moving use of photographs from my "Tears of Stone" project in their recent production of "All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914". This moving musical interweaves songs from that era with excerpts from poems and journals by soldiers from both sides of the trenches who experienced the Christmas Truce in December of 1914. It deserves to become a staple for theater companies around the world during the annual holiday season. Kathy decided to project my images onto the backdrop of the set so that the characters appeared to actually be in the battlefields and cemeteries themselves. It was very creative and remained truthful to the spirit of the images. It was a great experience to collaborate with her in this way and a nice opportunity to have these pictures "speak" in a different kind of way to an audience that otherwise would not have seen them.

The Process of Creating #2

The April 4, 2015, edition of The Economist contains a review about the new book What Comes Next and How to Like It, by Abigail Thomas. The review is unfortunately uncredited, but here are a few excerpts: "Abigail Thomas is not a painter, but she makes paintings anyway. Using oil-based house paint, which is toxic, she drips, flings and pours colour onto glass and then pushes it all around. Failed compositions are scraped away, yielding new and surprising arrangements...

This is not a book about painting. It is about pushing around sometimes toxic material in an effort- sometimes vain, often frustrating- to make something that looks right, or at least to find beauty in the results. This, of course, is what it means to write, and certainly to write a memoir...

As with her painting, Ms. Thomas's writing involves pushing around the colour and then scraping most of it away, leaving sentences that are as sculpted and considered as bonsai trees. The result is a thing of beauty, largely owing to the author's utter fearlessness in the face of the unexpected."

Although this review made me want to read the book, what I love most about it is the way it illuminates the creative process. It doesn't matter whether one is making artwork, crafting a business model, or creating a life- the process of creation is the same. It's often messy and disorganized, bewildering and frustrating. And once we get rid of anything that isn't truly important, we are hopefully left with something of substance, something wonderful, something worthy.

The Importance of Taking Time to Look

While the advent of 35mm roll film cameras heralded a whole new era in photography, the emergence of digital photography has done the same. One casualty of the ever-increasing ease in picture-taking is the time we spend looking at the scene in front of us before we press the shutter. This hurry-up approach was as true when 35mm cameras were first introduced to the marketplace as it is today. Put a digital camera in my hands, and I'll click away quickly and thoughtlessly with the best of them. (Burst mode, anyone?!) However the benefits of slowing down, of first spending time just looking at what is in front of us before we shoot, should not be ignored. This was brought home to me when I read "The Most Powerful Artwork I Have Ever Seen", an article about cave paintings by art critic Jerry Saltz. Saltz and his wife visited the Niaux Caves in France in 2008, and the experience  became a seminal moment for him in his understanding of art. The part of the article that spoke to me about the importance of spending time looking, though, was the following excerpt:

"...we came to what felt like a large, irregularly shaped cavern. I can still feel cool currents on my face. We were in the "Salon noir." Everything remained silent; our guide pointed her light to the ground so our eyes could adjust. After a moment, she wordlessly shined the beam upward. A never-ending clap of thunder sounded inside me; one reality was replaced by another...

Nothing [in the paintings I was looking at] seemed only imagined; everything felt observed, studied, thought about, recorded.

These are the paintings of people who looked at mammals for over 30,000 years - far longer than all of recorded history combined. I was seeing visual wisdom, the hard work of looking and taking the time and trouble to make exact renditions of what one watched. Looking at these images, I began to know things we don't know anymore but still know in our bones. These astounding levels of visual intelligence tell me that had these people wanted to make only symbolic images of their mysticism and magic, they could have...The clap of thunder that sounded for me in the caves was that the world outside and around these people was the same as the world that was inside them."

How odd it seems that today's art students need to be taught to "learn to see", when this was a fundamental requirement for survival for the earliest humans. Observing the color and shape of things, the ebb and flow of weather and tides, the behavior of prey, tasting unfamiliar plants and animals to see if they were edible- doing all of this built up a body of knowledge that enabled Homo sapiens to thrive. They thus gained the kind of innate understanding about their world that most of us sorely lack in the 21st century.

One of the reasons I like working with large- and medium-format cameras is that they require me to slow down. I simply can't work quickly with them. They demand that I consider carefully the scene in front of me, which is not something that happens with smaller, lighter cameras. Sometimes I will spend long hours looking for a shot that eludes me, and I won't make any exposures. But that time is not wasted, for it gives me practice in looking, and, hopefully, seeing. Taking the time to be fully present in the world around me is something I should be doing on a daily basis. And slowing down, regardless of the type of camera I have in my hands, would benefit my work greatly.

Optimism & Creativity

Ever since I first learned the meaning of the words "optimism" and "pessimism", I have known that I am an optimist. Even when things are at their worst, I am still, at my core, an optimist. That is why this quote from the great Nelson Mandela resonates with me: "I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward."

Being optimistic has helped me creatively in two ways: 1.) It has enabled me to harness fear in a constructive way, and 2.) It has given me faith that times of creative drought will eventually lead towards times of fertility. Looking forward while remaining fully in the present is a guiding principle in all that I do.

More Thoughts on Editing

I am currently in the midst of editing down a large number of photographs into a coherent series. It is an overwhelming task at times, as the sheer volume of images (about 1,300 to be specific) can't be dealt with all at once. This is something that will take time, as my goal is to end up with between 35-70 pictures total. I find that it really helps to edit in small doses, and taking a lot of breaks helps. Sometimes I need to step away from the work for a couple of days in order to recover from the visual overload. But editing, as I've written before, is so important to my creative process that I would never dream of hurrying it up. This was brought home to me when I read an article titled "The Creative Process" in the July/August, 2014 issue of The Atlantic magazine. In it, creative people in a range of fields were asked about "the inspiration and evolution of their work." The whole article was very interesting, but the section that featured short story author Lydia Davis was downright fascinating.

Davis, who won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, described what her life was like in the fall of 1973 and how she approached her writing early in her career. There followed the first draft of one of the stories she wrote at that time, "In a House Besieged":

"In a house besieged lived a man and a woman, with two dogs and two cats. There were mice there too, but they were not acknowledged. From the kitchen where they cowered in the man and woman heard small explosions. "The wind," said the woman. "Hunters," said the man. "Smoke," said the woman. "The army," said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already at home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged, in a house that belonged to someone else."

And then appeared the final draft:

"In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions. "The wind," said the woman. "Hunters," said the man. "The rain," said the woman. "The army," said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged."

What grace the final version has! What clarity, what elegance. Proof positive that excellent editing can strengthen the fruits of one's creative labors. In the final draft, there are no extraneous words that could distract from the message of the whole. Davis has cut out unnecessary details so that the point of the piece is more easily comprehended. The final version causes the reader to ask questions about what the implications of the story are, instead of answering every question the reader might have had. When editing, what is excluded often determines the strength and meaning of what is included.

And that is exactly the task at hand for me in my editing work. Exactly how many photographs need to be included in order for a sequence of pictures to be maximally strong? Which pictures should be included/excluded? What order should they be in? Those are the questions foremost on my mind as I work through the task at hand.

Photographic Archaeology

A character in "A Forgotten Poet", a story by Vladimir Nabokov, writes, "If metal is immortal then somewhere

there lies the burnished button I lost

upon my seventh birthday in a garden.

Find me that button and my soul will know

that every soul is saved and stored and treasured."

The same could be said for photographs. We take them and put them away somewhere, in a drawer, in a shoebox, on our computers, or in the Cloud. All too often, we proceed to forget about them.

Every once in a while, we happen to come upon these treasures from the past. When we do, our gaze falls upon them and memory is reawakened. Emotions bubble up and time shifts somehow. Going through old photographs is like participating in an archeological dig. We sift through layers of the past, trying to make connections between the history being revealed and the present.

It is inevitable that, in this process, questions will arise that cannot be answered. But by asking those questions, we learn something about our selves, and the past lives again. Photographs are not the only artifacts that have the ability to generate these sensations, but they do it in a way that is unique to the medium.

This has a direct bearing on the creative work I am doing now, in which I am sifting through my photographic archives and discovering much in the process. I'm still editing all of this, trying to make sense out of the thousands of images I am looking at. Stay tuned to what emerges!