I got a new album of music to listen to this week called ‘Inner symphonies’. I liked the title but it was only when I opened up the gatefold sleeve of the album that I understood the title. Inside were the words ‘for those who feel deeply’.
And it got me to thinking about the role of our emotions on our photography. As a good friend of mine has often said to me ‘the camera points both ways’. I have always understood that my own ‘art’ whether it was music making, drawing and painting as a kid, or photography now, has been, and still is, routed in something within me.
Each time we make a photo, perhaps we are making a mini inner-symphony? Each image we make can often symbolise something more about us, than the actual subject. Well, I think that is the way it should be.
Logic in a way, shouldn’t even come into the equation when making images:
‘Think less, and feel more’
is perhaps the way we should approach what we do. Or perhaps ‘respond’ rather than ‘think’.
I know I am someone who overthinks things, but when it comes to producing art, it is one of the rare moments in my life where overthinking, or even thinking diminish (those who know me may dispute this, and say that I never think at all ;-) . I seem to disappear and enter a form of meditation when I am making pictures.
I prefer to be drawn to something for reasons I do not know, than for reasons I do. As I believe that unearthed motivations have more truth in them than anything that is apparent. I like to think about what Mark Hollis once said about improvisation when writing songs. He said that when you are improvising, the first notes you play tend to be the more honest ones. Each subsequent replay becomes less and less honest, and more contrived as you struggle to now control the magic you just found.
And so, I think this is the way it is with fieldwork.
Respond rather than think,
do before analysis,
and try to be fresh each time you make a picture.
Perhaps I should invert this, and say:
feel first, respond second, and think later
There is magic in improvisation. For it is the act of escape from rules and self imposed aspirations. Working fluidly, and without any analysis or overthinking, is , in my view, the right path to creating surprising imagery and art.