That Long and Twisty Road

30-05

One of the recurring issues that young photographers discuss is triteness. You take a picture of a sunrise over water scene that totally grabs you. Your significant other loves it, your friends and acquaintances make positive noises when you show it to them. Then you think about sharing it with other photographers. Downer. You know an inevitable response is going to be: "nice – but I've seen it before."

This is a problem that actually disappears over time. The more time and effort we invest in art and in life, the more we get caught up in pursuing a line of expression that just happens to be one that no one else has pursued. We become fixated on certain subject matter, certain values, certain interpretative stances. Eventually, it's not just a sunrise over water scene but a [your name here] sunrise over water scene. Or you don't do sunrises over water any more because you're on to other things.

117-14

We can look at the camera as a recording tool that has no other function than to document the wonders of nature, just as seen. But where to stand? What height to shoot from? What focal length to use? What aspect ratio? What crop/composition? Then we get the picture back home and open it in our converter or editor: What white balance to use? What contrast curve to employ? Etc. Etc. At first we may make our decisions based on trying to duplicate the original scene ... as best we can recall it. But when we do that we get frustrated because all too often the results are technically correct but lacking the emotional impact of the original gestalt. So we start tinkering with Photoshop's capabilities or the darkroom's, looking for the nuances and intensity that simple documentation misses out on. And so it goes.

The good news is that you don't have to do anything but trust the process. Don't worry if your pictures seem like ones you've seen before. Just groove on what's happening today. The bad news is that the process has a dark side.

191-26

I showed a set of 13x19" prints of my latest fall landscape scenes (including the picture above) to a few people who are not in any way involved with the arts. It was painful to watch them leaf through the prints. It's not that the images were particularly inaccessible – the subject matter is the usual trees, fall colour, water, etc. But all they could see was the immediate grab aspects of each print – was this the kind of picture you would see on a calendar or a picture postcard or a TV commercial or wasn't it? All the effort I expended to convey the spirit of place, to invoke a certain mood, and to get the fine detail just so was wasted effort. The farther you go on the path of the artist, the more you leave behind those who are not traveling that path. And this is true even if you never venture into abstraction, surrealism, expressionism, etc.

This process is not in any way confined to the visual arts. Let's suppose your passion is cooking. You go off to Europe and study in France and Italy, come home and get hired by an expensive gourmet restaurant. Then you have family over for supper, so you decide against something esoteric like escargots in beurre noire and pheasant tortiere romanov with chives and herbes fines and instead opt to make something accessible like a classic beef Stroganoff. One relative turns up his nose and asks if you happen to have any hot dogs. Another digs right in but decides it's a little bland and asks for some Worchester or ketchup (but only if you have Heinz). A third has pretensions in this area and wants to know why you used tarragon instead of the customary oregano, when you didn't use any tarragon and oregano isn't in fact customary.

06-L0331

So if your goal is to communicate, to reach out to family, friends, and neighbours, the question "has this been done before?" is actually the reverse of what you want to ask. Instead, you should be asking "Is this close enough to something that everyone's seen before and are therefore comfortable with, or have I gone off the deep end with this one?" The safe course is to learn to cook hamburgers and hot dogs ... and not get too deeply into the subtleties of cooking them just so.

If that doesn't feel like an option, you may sigh, cross off all hope of reaching the uninitiated, then look to your fellow artists for understanding and approbation. Think of a group of working chefs who get together from time to time for a home-cooked meal. They'll all get together in someone's kitchen. One will make the salad, another the vegetables, another the meat dish, another the desert. When they sit down to eat, the conversation will inevitably go something like this:

06-2054

Cook A: "Roast baby potatoes in the skin with parsley and shallots ... nice ... hmmm ... rosemary, eh? That's interesting. I think I would have used tarragon and basil instead..."

Cook B: "Tarragon? With parsley? But of course you're pulling our legs."

Cook C: "I agree. The rosemary is fine. But I would never have let it cook in the butter to get all soggy. I'd have added the butter just before the end."

Then Cook D slams down his fork, bolts up toppling his chair, throws his napkin in the general direction of the table, and roars: "Soggy?!" My potatoes. SOGGY?"

Return to Digital Art