Greetings, comrades. This weekend, the current wife and I are all over the place celebrating our anniversary and my birthday, so while we’re out supporting the local economy, I’d like to leave you with a new collection of random thoughts that I’ve collected over the past couple of weeks. Enjoy!
Ex Libris
This week I found myself researching library stamps for a project I’m working on and came across several bearing the phrase Ex Libris, followed by a name. I had no idea these became popular among book collectors as a way of marking ownership and are officially called bookplates. Looks like books have been treasured possessions ever since the printing press arrived. The phrase ex libris means “from the library of” or simply “from the books of.” I gathered a few examples that caught my eye:
An unenviable future.
This week I stumbled upon a story shared by a Spanish photojournalist. He mentioned a speech by a respected neurologist who argued that the human brain is evolving, but that evolution will depend on how we, as a society, choose to accept certain limits.
Almost at the same time, he watched a video of a Russian drone chasing a fruit vendor in Ukraine before detonating an explosive charge beside him. I saw the same video just before reading his post, and I found myself asking the same question: to what extent are we, as a society, meant to accept the limits of warfare and our own capacity for destruction?
We are witnessing an extraordinary collapse of humanistic and ethical thinking, one that leads us towards an unenviable future. Any organisation capable of stopping such atrocities seems to face obstruction from those in power, whose interests in the arms industry have become grotesquely disproportionate.
Where are the limits?
The photojournalist in question is Tino Soriano, and he’s the definition of common sense.
Recruiting for the Empire.
Speaking of evil, the other day the current wife was telling me that, at work, they held individual interviews because the company wanted to know whose hearts and minds were aligned with its values.
As she described it, all I could picture was something straight out of Star Wars. That’s exactly the sort of thing the Galactic Empire would do. Apparently they even gave the interviews an ominous title like “Corporate Alignment” or something equally sinister.
Basically, management at the Death Star wanted to know whether their stormtroopers were sufficiently aligned with the Empire. If they are, an insignificant promotion awaits. If not, they could face disintegration
I’m glad I don’t have to deal with an evil corporate agenda.
Technically wrong is the way.
Recently I received feedback on a set of images from a reputable photography website. It would have been genuinely useful had it not been completely anonymous.
No name means there’s no weight to the feedback. It’s not the same getting critique from Yayoi Kusama as it is from one of the assistants in Yayoi Kusama’s studio. Both may know the arts, but only one has walked the walk.
Anyway, one part of the criticism was about my images not being straight and having an “annoying tilt”. I took that personally because it’s a stylistic choice. Tilts and Dutch angles have been part of my work for over a decade. Not that they need to know this but a look at my website might have given a hint.
.Annoying tilts ...has this person never seen the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand or, if we really want to exaggerate things, Romain Laurent?
I do agree with the rest of the critique though, my compositions could have more tension, or start being a little bit more complex so I’ll happily take that criticism. But straight photos? Come on!
What’s the point of being technically perfect all the time? Where’s the humanity in that? Where’s the personal expression? Where’s the narrative?
Feeling is the key, Robert Frank said it:
“When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
Do or do not... The constant battle with self doubt.
More often than before, I wake up with a little anxiety and self-doubt. Mostly the kind of thoughts that assure me everything I want to achieve won’t work for one reason or another. All my future plans will fail, so I’d better find something else to do.
Business people would call this a pivot. I hate that word!
These thoughts have become more frequent the older I get, and it can be difficult to tell when they’re legitimate concerns and when they’re simply a self-defence mechanism trying to steer me back towards comfort.
I’ve had so many ideas that never saw the light of day because I planned them to death instead of taking the risk. I don’t know whether they were good or bad ideas. Ideas are just ideas until you put them into practice.
Instead, I’ve often let my emotions decide what gets done and what remains a possibility. I get excited about something and throw myself into it, until self-doubt arrives armed with convincing excuses. I begin imagining a future full of failure and struggle, and slowly the idea disappears.
But grief has been teaching me to become careless with those thoughts. To make friends with struggle. To understand that self-doubt is simply the shadow cast by the light of an idea, and that both belong to the same process.
The process has taught me that I have high standards, but also that I didn’t get here by knowing everything. I got here by making mistakes. By struggling. By continuing.
High standards are a good thing. The only thing I have to do is keep doing the work, over and over, until the results begin to appear. Things are happening, things are coming!
That’s the creative process.
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