the INSPIRED eye

Notes on Creativity for Photographers

Volume I David duChemin

Introduction to the muse.

Why a book about the inner life of the photographer when all around us people are clamoring to buy every how-to book thats written, and to fill every how-to workshop offered? Because for the creative photographer, our making of photographs is an outward expression of something inward. If my previous writings insist that the question How ought to be preceeded by the question Why, then this book assumes that the discussion of photography as an outward expression ought to be preceeded by - or at least accompanied by - a discussion about the inner life from which that outward expression springs. Another reason is a more experiential one. For the past three years my blog, The Pixelated Image, has become a gathering place for people who seem weary of all this geeking-out over technology and

technique without ever considering concepts like vision. Time and again people have emailed me telling me how much they resonate with something Ive said about vision or my own journey as a photographer wrestling to find and express that vision. Ive been on workshops in the Himalayas and listened to capable photographers tell me about their feelings of frustration and inadequacy as though it were a shameful secret. Its time we talked about it openly. Its time we took a look at issues we all wrestle with - from understanding creativity and inspiration, to hearing - finally - that other photographers struggle to find and express their vision, and in that commonality find a little relief. Because if its normal to feel this way and to find it hard to uncover our inspiration or feel good about our efforts to express it, then we can stop wondering whats wrong with ourselves and get on with the task at hand - the difficult, painful, beautiful, eye-opening process of seeing and photographing the world from our perspective. If theres a danger in all this navel-gazing its that it could as easily just remain there. Im not a counsellor and this is not a self-help book. This is a book, in two volumes, about the inner process of photography. As such its got to be practical. So from the beginning thats my pledge to you - to write a practical book, more a series of essays but the word essay sounds so formal and academic and I know some of you would rather stick a fork in your eye than go down that road. Yes, its going to get artsy fartsy-around here, possibly even touch-feely, but Ill only indulge it as it pertains to being and becoming a stronger photographer. A CONFESSION Being creative is hard. Anyone whos read anything Ive ever written has heard this before. Some would rather hear a pep talk about how easy this is going to be, would rather know that I keep fairies and rainbows in my camera bag, than to hear that this is tough. Creativity, inspiration, the need to seemingly create something where once there was nothing - its not easy stuff to write about, or wrap your mind around. And it sure as heck isnt easy stuff to 2

pursue. That should be encouraging to you. The fact that every photographer - no, every single person I know in the creative arts finds this stuff difficult at times means that my own struggles arent unique, shouldnt be unexpected, and are not a barrier to me doing good work, even great work, that I enjoy and love. Thats my confession and Im going to come back to it at the end of the book (youll find it at the end of Vol.2). But Im starting with it so you dont think any of this is a panacea against the difficulty of creation. Its not. All of this Im writing in order to put some handles on the creative process. The process itself is not magic, nor mystical, even though I will talk about the muses more than once. Consider it a metaphor. But while the process isnt magic, its also not something humans have ever been able to completely predict, the rarity of that thing we call inspiration is what makes it so valuable. But gold is valuable too, and there are things you can do to better your chances of finding it. Sitting and wishing for more of it, for example, is unlikely to make you richer or more creative. Neither is buying a shinier shovel. Its an imperfect analogy, but pretend for a moment that this is gold were speaking about. If you were intent on finding it youd study it, youd not waste your time looking in the wrong places, wishing or hoping that it would just appear. Youd use the best tools. Youd speak with others who have looked - and found - gold. And because inspiration and creativity are not magical processes, the search for them is not unlike the search for gold. The muses were godesses, the sources of inspiration in classical greek mythology. If you pleased them, or if they so pleased, they would inspire you and your work would be blessed with uncommon brilliance. That most of us no longer believe quite so literally in muses is not the point. Like I said, its metaphor, and as such there are things we can do to make the muses look more kindly on our efforts to create.

Inspiration comes with working.

If Ive learned anything about the nature of so-called inspiration, its that it is, more often than not, something that comes as a result of work and not a precursor to it. We photographers could learn a thing or two from writers. Over the past two years Ive read several books about the writers life, mentally substituting writer for photographer and its been an eye-opener. Photographers often wait for inspiration to come, for the appearance of a good idea, before they get working and shooting. Writers dont engage in such delusions. They put their butts in their chairs day after day, and write; they excavate the great ideas like diamonds, and then they re-write and re-write to polish those great ideas. Writing is not the process they engage in once theyve found that great idea; its the very process they use to find it. If we wait until weve got a great idea before we do the work required to come up with it in the first place, itll be a long wait for a train that dont come, if you know what Im saying. The muse, as Steven Pressfield says in The War of Art, honours the working stiff. Perhaps what we need to do is abandon the metaphor of the muse for a minute. When I was a kid, sitting on the floor of my bedroom with a bucket of Lego, I didnt wait for the muse. I put piece after piece together, getting ideas, playing with them, rejecting them in favour of another idea, and playing with that new idea until it had worked out or Id again chucked it and moved on. There were no excuses, no blaming it on the muse when I didnt build something. I just mashed the pieces together until I came up with something I liked. New ideas arent unlike this. Every new idea is really only ever a combination or juxtaposition of existing ideas or elements. Back to the Lego: if you want to build a new Lego building (your hoped-for new idea, the next great concept), you need to begin with a pile of blocks (other ideas, experiences, skills, what-ifs) and then you need to mash them together until something sticks. These

blocks arent going to mash themselves any more than a great idea is going to drop out of the sky. And when you do have one of those rare moments when the idea seems to do so - fall out of the sky - step back and youll most often see that its a combination of ideas and elements your brains been working on in the background. Its exceedingly rare that an idea just comes out of nowhere.

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action. ~ Frank Tibolt You cant wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ~ Jack London

Increase your inputs.

This one probably should have been first, but I needed to lay the groundwork first. If you look at the lives of any of the creative geniuses you admire, past or present, youll find that where their art is concerned, they have a work ethic that outpaces their less prodigious or prolific peers. But before you can work - to return once more to the Lego analogy - at building your next new thing, you need a bucket of blocks. You can work all you like, without raw materials you wont get far. And by not far, I mean you wont get anywhere. Creative people are raw material gatherers, they hunger for ideas and go outside of the camp to find them. You must increase your inputs, the more ideas and influences you ingest, the more your creative being has to work with - the more Lego blocks your inner creative has to work with. But where people create work that is credited with being really creative (whatever that actually means) its when they combine dissparate elements and ideas - the more unlikely the ideas that get mashed together, the more unique the result. It is a constant source of amazement to me that photographers visual artists not unsimilar to painters in some ways - stay so close to home in their search for inputs, ideas, and inspiration. Find me an uninspired photographer who is wrestling with the equivalent of writers block and Ill show you a photographer whos not being bold and adventurous as they collect raw materials. Whens the last time you studied Cezanne, Picasso, Monet, or Rembrandt in search of new ways of looking at light, composition, or subject matter? How longs it been since you went to an art show or the local art gallery? Who is your favourite scultptor? Architect? Choreographer? In our quest to memorize the B&H catalog were at risk of perilously shal-

low exposure to other arts, especially visual arts. Of course thats not the only place we get ideas. Books, long walks, conversations with other photographers, films; the sources from which we might draw our raw materials are endless. Where you go to increase your inputs is less important initially than that you do it at all. Ideas are not born out of nothing. Theres a latin phrase - ex nihilo nihilo fit - and its used to describe creation. It means out of nothing, nothing comes. You will never create an idea or new work that is not a combination of previous ideas, however old or dissimilar. What about ruts? Youll never get out of a rut by driving in the same direction as the one in which the ruts take you. You need to jump the ruts, and thats often a violent action - a reaction against the current direction. So dont keep doing more of the same old same old and hope itll yield new results. Get out for a morning and go look at something really different. It doesnt even have to be something you like. Just go absorb it, react to it. Dont try to form new ideas - this is not the ideation process and the muse wont be rushed. This is just gathering; increasing the inputs. It wont even feel productive; productivity is not the point. Gathering inputs is the point. Productivity comes next. For now, get out. If you dont have an art gallery, get online and look at the work of Picasso. Read up on the painting Guernica and then spend some time looking at it. Pick up pen and paper and sketch out some of the great paintings of history, look at how the painter placed the elements within the frame. Interact with it, then move on. Go watch a movie and take notes about the framing or the use of optics. Think. Engage. Play. 8

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Incubate.
If any suggestion I make is going to sound flaky its this one, but do any reading on the process of ideation or creativity and youll find this concept repeated over and over again. Forget Lego, its a lousy metaphor for incubation. Instead lets use the concept from which incubation is drawn. Lets look at the messy process of the most profound act of creation - the making of life. The inputs, ahem, are there. The work is there. And when the pieces begin to come together, there is always a period of incubation or gestation. A place for the raw materials to gel and do their thing. The idea I mentionned in the first concept - Inspiration Comes From Working - the one that just falls out of the sky? It never does. It comes out of the womb, emerges from the egg, and it looks newborn and fresh but its been forming in the background, hidden in the egg or womb for weeks, or months. In the case of the blue whale its a year, and for the elephant its nearly two. Dont rush the big ideas, they can take a while in coming. Its the power of incubation that is behind our Eureka! moments, those rare occassions in the shower when an idea just comes to you. The idea didnt just come anywhere. It was there all along, mashed together from unlikely elements in your unconscious or subconscious, until it was ready. Look, I dont pretend to know how ideation works, just that the brain is a powerful thing, it runs in the background when no one is looking, and then throws the idea out there once its got some shape and lets you, the muses, or too much wine take the credit. Ideas hatch, they are born, but only after some period of gestation. Its from this that we talk about ideas being half-baked, pulled from the oven before the process is finished. So give yourself some time. Dont force ideas. Play with them, look in on them from time to time, but dont get impatient with them. Instead work on that one thing you can control - making sure youve got a constant flow of input, and giving the idea time and space to grow.

Creativity -- the power to connect the seemingly unconnected. ~ William Plomer

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Know your creative space.

We all do our best creative work in our own way and in our own space. For some that space is mental space, and the need for chaos and noise. For others its the polar opposite and they dont work well when too much stuff begins to fill in the margins of their life. Others still need to work in a particular physical space, like a crowded Indian market or a silent studio. What is important is that you are aware of which space is, for you, the most conducive to your process, and finding that space. Here are a couple thoughts about my own best creative spaces, spaces which I know many creatives also find optimal. But remember, this is not prescriptive - find and nurture your own space. Mental Space: Focus on the Positive I remember once telling someone I hated a particular movie. She told me I was being negative. I replied, Ok, Im positive I hated the movie. Not what she meant, apparently. When it comes to being creative I do not work well in the negative and on the right day, can I ever find the negative. I can give you a million reasons a shot wont work, a piece of gear isnt ideal, the lens I have is wrong, the light is crap, and that - in point of fact - the world is conspiring against me. But creativity doesnt do so well in that mental space. Creativity needs a constant flow of possibility, and negativity stops that flow with No instead of Yes. If youve ever done theatre sports or improv you know this - when people go with the flow and say yes, work with the given scenarios, it develops a life of its own. When they say no, they stop the whole process dead in its tracks. More on that later. So instead, go with it. Natural lighting is harsh? Create images with a starker look, use the opportunity to use your reflectors, or find some shade. Lens isnt creating the look you want? Use this as a chance to experiment with a new look. Whatever the challenge, getting frustrated puts me into a decidedly non-creative space and

then Im useless to solve the problem creatively because Ive killed the one thing I have going for me - creativity. So roll with it, refuse to get side-lined by your frustration - find a way to go with the current rather than fight it. Physical Space: Find Your Own Creative people do not work in all spaces equally. For some their best creative space is at a coffee shop somewhere, or a park, a certain room of their home, or corner of their office. For some that space is not a place at all but a time - early morning, late at night. And for others still that space is a set of conditions - some work

better with music, some with coffee, still others - particularly french poets - under the influence of opiates, syphilis, and absinthe. I recommend the music and coffee, myself. Whatever conditions work best for you its good to be conscious of them. Its also good to try not to allow your creativity to be defined by them. Discovering why you work more creatively in a certain space will allow you to harness your creativity in broader and broader spaces. Ive recently discovered that my best creative space works, in part, due to solitude. But the reason the solitude helps is the lack of pressure and expectations from others. Just discovering this has made it easier to be at my most creative even when others are around - I just need to control the voices and inputs, to not allow myself to give them heed. I cant explain it much more than that, so I hope this is resonating with some of you enough that you can do something with it. Whatever your own best creative space, be familiar with it and use that knowledge to your advantage. I write best in a coffee shop after a good walk to get there. I put Van Morrison on my iPod and settle in. I write for 2-4 hours and then Im done. The benefit I draw from this routine is incredible. Im conditioned by this ritual and when the headphones go on and Van starts crooning out the first line of Hyndford Street, I find myself already in a groove. When I photograph, my process is different, but familiar, and its in that space, through that process that I work best. Its familiar, so when the frustrations - part of the process - come, my familiarity with them allows me to roll with them instead of letting them derail me.

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Embrace the constraints.

Creativity does not flourish in the absence of constraints, it flounders. Constraints not only aid creativity, they are essential to it. Consider architect Frank Lloyd Wright, no slouch when it comes to creativity, who said, Man built most nobly when limitations were at their greatest. As photographers we begin with the constraint of the frame, and the limits of our technology, but the forces that limit our choices, and therefore force creativity, are numerous. We work with the constraints of available light, technology, budgets, the availability and quality of our optics, the fleeting moment, the capriciousness of client demands and budgets, and more. Dont fight them; embrace them. Find ways to go with the flow of the river instead of fighting it. Or find a way to bridge those constraints; that itself is an act of creativity. If great ideas are a juxtaposition of existing ideas, then creative thinking is finding a way to combine several constraints and making a way through them to accomplish your goal. You can go two ways on this. You can fight it and spend your time battling constraints, or you can embrace it and spend your time looking for a great solution and making something exceptional. The fighting rarely works for most of us. The more you see constraints as a catalyst to creativity and not a problem to be overcome, the more creative you will become and the less fruitless trips to the camera store you might make. If youre feeling your creativity stagnating and wishing for a return to that feeling of flourishing creative photography, try getting counter-intuitive and start playing with your constraints.

Whats in the way is the way. - Lao Tzu

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Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous. ~ Bill Moyers

Be open to serendipity.
I read an article once about the connection between Jazz and comedy, specifically the element of improvisation. It got me thinking that there are strong connections to the world of photography. If what we do most of the time is unlike improv theatre, I dont know what is. The first rule of improv is this: Say Yes. Saying No blocks possibilities, prevents the others that are complicit in the process from playing their hand. Its a move made by the heavy-handed and the control-freak, and improv - as well as photography and any creative process - is not the place for the closed-minded. Anyone with a death-grip on the steering wheel of the creative process forgets that there are a mulitplicity of elements beyond his control. At best you control the way in which you react to all the constraints that come your way, trying to control them removes you from the creative process, the act of making something. But saying yes to what comes your way, allowing to be what it is, and moving with it, thats an act of grace you bring to the situation in which you are photographing. Saying yes to chance happenings and seeing where they lead opens you to ideas and possibilities larger than yourself, to collaborate with forces and events bigger than you, and in turn to create images that are unexpected even to yourself, to create photographs that are bigger than your initial plans and concepts. Call it an act of grace on the part of the muses, or a conspiracy of the angels, time or just dumb luck, its the way in which you respond to this that creates the exceptional image, poem, or concept. Luck, as they say, favours the prepared. It also favours the open-minded and the creative soul willing to roll with what comes instead of fighting it. 20

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Make more mistakes.

Creation is risky stuff. Its at the whim of lunatics with a bad habit of asking, What if? When were kids we get this. We create, we draw, we conjur things from our imagination while adults, the kind ones anyways, bite their tongues to refrain from asking What is that? When were young weve yet to be told that drawings have to look like something, that the grown-up world doesnt look kindly on purple skies and green suns. But eventually we get told to colour within the lines, to paint by numbers, and were creatively abused in all manner of ways. We stop finger painting, and trade in our crayons for mathematics and correct answers. Slowly were encouraged to stop risking, to step in line, and to meet expectations.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. ~ Pablo Picasso

If you want to allow your muse or imagination to flourish you need to recall those childhood instincts. Art is a subversive activity. It pushes against boundaries, even if, at the beginning, those boundaries are first your own. You must, must, start making mistakes. You must risk. You must; its not optional. If you are not making mistakes and falling on your face over and over again, if you dont embrace making these mistakes, then youre not risking enough and youre not working close enough to the edges of your own creativity. Art is not for the safe and when it operates within the confines of safety it creates only the familiar and unexceptional Im not sure where we got this need for safety; perhaps its the need not to look foolish, to appear at the top of our game instead of as a constant learner. We talk about this craft in terms of mastery and I wonder if thats an attainable or desirable goal. To master something, to get to a place where there is no more room at the top, wheres the fun in that? Its only a perspective shift, a change

of paradigms, but what if, instead of mastery, the goal was to get to the place we once were? To play, to ask What if? and to colour outside of the lines and never within them unless it suits our fancy. What if we all stopped believing that the best photograph was the one that was perfectly focused, perfectly composed and perfectly exposed, and instead believed that the best photograph was the one with the least colour inside the lines? Its not, of course; the best photograph is the one that expresses our vision and passion, that says look at this, feel this the way I see it to someone other and they do in fact look at it, see it, and feel it differently. Whether we colour inside or outside the lines is up to us. There can be as much tyranny in the demand to colour outside the lines as there is to colour within them. But sometimes to get out of one pattern we need to steer hard to the left or right, in a direction opposite, or at least perpendicular to the rut in which weve been conditioned to stay.

Once the amateurs naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur. ~ Alfred Eisenstaedt
Fail. Risk. Ruin some rolls of film. Shoot hundreds of crappy frames. Blur them. Overexpose them. Stop focusing. Play with a new lens, a new filter. The images in the next volume of this book will be from my Hasselblad 500 C/M - a camera I bought entirely for the purpose of jumping my ruts. Its as close to perpendicular I can get to my ruts. Its film, its medium format, the viewfinder is at waist level and the image is flipped. I shoot black and white and grainy as heck. And the lens is an 80mm lens, the equivalent of a 50mm on a 35mm frame and as far away from the extreme focal lengths I usually shoot. It has no light meter. I get no immediate feedback. But the thrill of being out there with this lovely tool, freed from the digital shackle, is liberating. But each time I go out is a new chance to fight my fear of failure. This tool forces me to fail, to risk, and in so doing to create images I love for their very imperfection. Technically perfect images seldom move the heart. 24

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. ~ Scott Adams

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. ~ Erich Fromm

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Creativity is a capricious mistress. She seems to play hide and seek with us; she taunts us, beckons us. And all the while we fight the voices that tell us not to risk, not to fail, not to colour without the lines. Each time we go out we fear, we worry that our eyes will dim, that well see nothing, that weve shot our last frame.

Conclusion.

Its important to remember that this is no competition, no manic race to the finish line. In fact, we dont pursure creativity at all. Creativity is the path on which we walk. Looking for it is missing the point. What we seek is expression, and a means by which we can see something new, capture something unique, and show the world. Looking for creativity is like looking for oxygen. Instead, learn to breathe. Creativity,as a process is no more mysterious than breathing. In fact, the word inspiration means just that, to breathe in. It does, after a time, become easier, less self-conscious and asthmatic. But it takes more work to get there than breathing which, thank God, requires less attention. But at the same time, its so similar. Breathe in. Breathe out. Increase the inputs, let them incubate, then get them out there with all the willingness in the world to make mistakes and look foolish. The deeper you breathe, the stronger you get. Creativity can become a habit, and as it does it becomes more familiar. No less predictable, perhaps, but you can count on the muse to show up and show you something, and thats a good day for most of us.

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask how, while others of a more curious nature will ask why. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information. ~ Man Ray

Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more. ~Benjamin Cardozo

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