PixelatedImage Blog

Havana, Cuba, Jan’2009

I’m sitting in a coffee shop writing. Rather, I’m supposed to be writing. All I have to do is wrap up the week with one last post about photographic vision. And I’m stuck.

Stuck.

What do I want to say?

Thirty minutes, I’m still pounding my head on the table. If I drink one more espresso this morning my heart will stop. What. Do. I. Want. To. Say? And then I get it.

That’s the point of the whole thing. All these many words – so many words – about vision, and to some extent I might just have started with the ending. What do I want to say?

What do you want to say?

I wrote this several months ago and can’t for the life of me figure out how to say it in more clever words, so I’ll just quote it as though someone wiser than I said it;

“Author Anne Lammot says that to be great, art must point at something. What you decide to point at – whether it’s the ugliness of injustice or the beauty of Vermont in the fall – is your vision. How you point at it is your craft. The more unique your vision, and the more practiced your craft, the more powerful your art.“

What do you want to say? What do you love so much that despite your best efforts to enjoy shooting weddings/ducks/portraits you go back to that one thing over and over again? Maybe it is ducks. More power to ya. If I have to spend another hour swatting mosquitoes in the muck I’d go insane. But if it is ducks, then for the love of Moose Peterson say something. Photographing ducks is not cliche, but how you shoot ducks might be. Bring something new to the table, shoot so many ducks from so many angles that you get the stuff we’ve already seen out of the way, and then show me that thing you discover on your 10,000th frame.

I know I said that the worst response to an image is not dislike but indifference. Perhaps second to that, or connected to it, is having to answer the question, What am I looking at? If you look at my photograph and have no idea what I am trying to show you, I’ve failed. Because art or no art, I want to point to something and if you can’t see what I’m pointing at because I’ve been unclear in my vision or my craft, your response will be indifference. So whether I do or do not like ducks or yellow taxis or whatever, when I look at your photograph I should still see something. You can’t make me like it, but you can point to it in the clearest, most passionate and unique way possible. I want to look at your image and say, So that’s what she sees!

At the end of the day what is it you want to point at? What do love so much that, despite all efforts to shoot something “more commercial” you come back to over and over again? If, according to Jonathan Swift, vision is the “art of seeing what is invisible to others” then craft is the art of pointing it out and employing every tool in your repertoire to direct my attention, if not my heart, to it.

Stuck? What do you want to say?

This week has been a needful one for me. I’ve needed just to get out and play, to fast from all the gear-talk and the gear-blogs, to sift through some things and recalibrate. To rediscover the Why. I’m emerging from it with two things – the first is a renewed sense of play – no clients, no shot list – just following my eye where it leads and pointing my camera when the muse says “Look at that!” It’s been exhilarating. The second is to have uncovered for myself the link between vision and craft. My artist likes my geek just a little more at the end of the week than he did at the beginning. And my geek is out buying a beret and a black turtleneck right now. I hope this week’s been a good one for you, thanks for playing along. Have a great weekend; go point at something.