Discreet Music

For a few weeks, while I was away in Bolivia and Patagonia, I had a little portable pair of stereo speakers for my iPod. I've had trouble sleeping of late, partly due to the change in time zones, climate, different beds each couple of days, and so on. I found Brian Eno's album 'Discreet Music' was ideal for listening to while I tried to sleep. I found it extremely soothing and it often fitted the background very well.

I read this about the album today on Wikipedia:

"The inspiration for this album began when Eno was left bed-ridden in a hospital by an automobile accident and was given an album of eighteenth-century harp music.^[2] After struggling to put the record on the turntable and returning to bed, he realized that the volume was turned down (toward the threshold of inaudibility) but he lacked the strength to get up from the bed again and turn it up. Eno said this experience taught him a new way to perceive music:

"This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music—as part of the ambience of the environment just as the color of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience."

I found this extremely interesting. Eno was forced to re-interpret the harp music in an unintended way. I often find many things are more interesting when used in an unintended way, and I think as a creative person, we should not just assume, but instead, we should enquire. This is what Eno did with his harp music, and I feel this is very much the main task of a creative person. We are enquirers. We engage with our subjects and we should question what is there, because without questioning, we may never see a new side, a new angle, or come across a discovery in our own art.

That alone is worth discussing. But let's move on to the main point for me - he decided to put an album together that was basically 'furniture music', music that was intended to fit as ambience more than anything. I often find other music like Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians is also perfect background ambience. But I think what got me in the last sentence in Wikipedia was Eno comparing the harp music as just another facet of his environment: it was no different from  the colour of the light or the sound of the rain.

In a way, shouldn't there be little or no separation between what we create and our environment? It is our environment that is our influence. We are a product of our environment, so why should be compartmentalise our creative time from the rest of our lives?

I know for instance, that many workshop participants tell me it takes them a few days to get their visual muscle working well while out making images. Perhaps I've had too much exercise in that department, but I see no reason why I can't always be thinking visually while I am not making images. Why should I compartmentalise this to something I do when I make images, and something I don't do, while I am watching TV, or driving?

I prefer not to compartmentalise. For instance, when I make images out in the field, I see no separation from the shoot, and the edit. In fact, I often feel as though I am iteratively going back and forth from editing and creating while I am on location, and I often re-compose the image through cropping once back at home. Putting a logical division in there, only gets in the way of what it is that I am doing - it is one never ending journey.

Currently, I have around 68 rolls of film from my recent trip to Patagonia and Bolivia away for development, but I don't consider the creative process stalled or stopped at the moment; they feel as if they are simply fermenting in my mind, waiting for the continuation of their birth to happen once they arrive back on my desk at home.

I certainly found listening to Discreet Music at a low volume was important. Too loud, and it dominated, but at the right volume, it integrated with my environment, and worked at a subliminal level. I was aware that something was being played, but my thought patterns weren't distracted by it.

I feel I have the same attitude whilst working on my images. And when I mean working on them, I mean the entire process - from out in the field, to back at the ranch in my digital darkroom: the process is one and the same thing for me. The process shouldn't be overly demanding. I shouldn't be overwhelmed at any stage, because this induces a form of stress. Stress is a form of blockage. Blockages have nothing to do with being creative, but more to do with writers block. To create, things must flow.

Creative people know that work has a way of surfacing. It may feel as if there was no intervention at times, because I think we tap into our subliminal states whilst we are in the creative mode.

Listening to music such as Eno's Discreet Music teaches me something. It taught me that my own mind is always working on things, even when I am not aware of it, and that when I think I haven't started on some work, that maybe the work is already underway in the back of my mind. I never really know how new work comes about, how it is created or where the source of it lies. All I know is that by being receptive to my subconscious, and by not putting boundaries or divisions up in my creative process (field work vs digital darkroom work for instance, or by thinking there are times for being creative, and times for when I shouldn't be), the work has a chance to flow.

Journeys are Important

A few days ago I had a very enlightening conversation with my friend Vlad that has ultimately led onto the creation of this post. We were discussing Vlad's video, and how he finds the time waiting at airports a form of mental adjustment in which he is able to prepare himself for what lies ahead. So often do I find that over the hours or days that I spend traveling some place to make photographs, there seems to be a mental transition of sorts that happens for me too. I feel it's a requirement of the creative process, almost a meditative time. Let me explain a little better.

When I first leave home, I'm usually still wrapped up very much in my home life. Friends, family, Edinburgh the town I live in, is my environment. I'm a city dweller. So while I am at home, my mind is often turned to the day to day living of being in a small city. If I were to teleport immediately to some remote landscape, I think I would find myself emotionally disorientated. I seem to need to have the journey time between home and location in which to let go of my city life, and slowly prepare, and move into the life I have while in a wilderness location.

There is a need, certainly for me, to have this time, to be able to transfer from one environment to another. Far off places, and perhaps friends who live there, are but an abstract notion when they are not immediately in my present day to day life. I have to file them away as some extension of me, and it takes me a while to step into the life of the people I know in these far off places. It also takes me a while to forget about my city life, to be able to fully let go.

There needs to be this transference stage. It's vital to have it, so that I'm emotionally ready and prepared to accept the landscapes I photograph.

Now imagine a world where distances are becoming smaller and things are becoming more immediate. Do you think these remote landscapes would be just as appealing to us if we could get there in a very short space of time? I don't think they would. We wouldn't have the appreciation for them as we wouldn't have had the settling in time, that a plane ride gives us. That time to reflect, to consider where we are going. A plane ride is forced meditation. It is a vital part of the process where we can let our minds float freely, allowing things to go and for our aspirations and anticipations of the future, to come to us. I think it's prep time, for my creativity.

This subject leads on rather neatly to the personal issues I have with what I do for a living now. Every few weeks I am away somewhere in the world. It can be a disorientating thing to be doing on a frequent basis, because it always takes me time to settle back into my Edinburgh life when I'm home, and then there is the mental and emotional demands of preparing myself for a workshop or photo tour somewhere that will require maybe a week or so of my time. I can only describe it as relocation-lag. Where it takes a while for my mind and spirit to settle into a different environment.

I'm just curious how this all affects the creative process? How do you see it affecting you? Does it take time for you to settle into a new environment before you can make images, or do you find that the newness is what inspires you to make images? Have you considered that the plane ride for a few hours, is perhaps like a meditative requirement, something that needs to be done, in order to prepare your mind for what is to come?

I think this is also why I need to have space between my shooting sessions and the post-editing. I need time to be able to absorb what it was I felt and took in while in a remote landscape. I can't be objective about it, or give the work the attention it deserves, if I come home and immediately start to edit it. I'm almost trying to complete the work, before my mind has even reached its own conclusion of the emotions and events that I'm still absorbing.

If I were to edit soon after the shoot, I feel the edits would be a rushed response, and would show little care for just what it is, that I'm still absorbing.

Traveling gives us time, and with that time, we gain insight. Travel also gives us distance, and with this distance, we gain a different kind of insight. Both contribute to the creative process in different ways. We should embrace them, because they are part of the creative journey and have impact on what it is we do and how we reach a creative conclusion.

Dissonance in Photographs?

In the world of music, dissonance is something that is learned at an advanced stage in the development of any musician whether they are simply learning to play or while writing their own compositions. Consider that during the early stages of musical development, most musicians learn to play (and also write) very simple melodies. Structures are uncomplicated and the use of chords as an expression is perhaps somewhat limited. Over time, as they develop, they delve into more complex musical structures and eventually begin to incorporate chords and complex overtones that have feelings of tension and expectation to them. This is known in musical terms as 'dissonance'. Dissonance is not a bad thing, it can provide depth and complexity to music and take us into different worlds of feeling and mood. We've all been subjected to it, for example - in film scores where it is used to convey drama. The music becomes extremely agitated and complex. It is a universal language we all understand.

Yesterday I had a very nice conversation with a musical friend of mine about this very topic. Since the conversation, I've been considering if there is a parallel to 'dissonance' in photographic images. I'm certainly aware that we can have dissonance in photographs, but I'm not altogether clear if dissonance is a good thing in images. Is it possible to have an image that creates tension, but at the same time be pleasing to our eye?

I also think that it's not possible to use musical development as a similar analogy to that of image making, as they both appear to be opposite from each other. In music, simple compositions or melodies are often encountered early on in our musical tastes and development, while more complex forms of music are often acquired over a long period of time while we learn to enjoy their depth and meaning. With photographic images, we often start with very busy, complex scenes, because we haven't developed our eye to remove all the distracting elements contained within the frame. It is only over many years that we become able to refine our compositional eye and notice things that need to be removed.

This has been my assumption until yesterdays conversation with my music friend. I'm now unsure if my idea that imagery should be simple, is a correct one. Certainly for many people who wish to improve their photography, gaining a more selective eye is a good thing. But what if you do want to create images that have a degree of tension in them? Surely it is ok for an image to be overly complex, to have a dissonance to it - if this is what you intended?

I think there is a difference between dissonance in an image, and a bad composition. For me, dissonance implies that the work is good, while containing a degree of tension in it. Bad compositions are often bad photographs because the composition creates a form of tension that is displeasing to the viewer's eye.

I'd like to hear your views, and maybe you can point me towards work where you feel there is dissonance (read tension) while at the same time, the work is superb. I'd love to hear from you.

postnote: I deliberately used the two images of Raudfoss in Iceland in this posting, because I feel there is perhaps more tension in the first image due to the more fractured foreground landscape. The second image has a less fractious foreground, with more space and is perhaps therefore calmer than the first. But there is still a degree of complexity to both of them, and I'm wondering if this is dissonance, of a sort? The images aren't bad, in fact, I'm very pleased with them, but there is certainly a complex overtone to both of them. How else may dissonance be conveyed in an image? A dramatic thunderous sky perhaps can convey drama, but does it convey tension? Do you feel on edge when looking at pictures of storms?

Black and White Canvas

Following on from my previous two posts (white Canvas and then Black Canvas) where I discussed the use of snow (white canvas) or black sand (black canvas) as a blank canvas in which to place isolated objects thus creating a simplified composition / photograph, it's time to talk about incorporating the two.

Of course, the title of this post suggests I'm talking about black and white photography. I'm not. I'm just amalgamating the previous two posts together. If you've not read them, then I suggest that you do, as they are really the foundation to where I'm going with all of this.

You see, for me, photography is not about great scenery. It's about tonal compositions. If we abstract a scene down to the basic building blocks we have tone and form. That's all we have. We don't have trees, we don't have rivers, we don't have beaches. Forget all those 'meaningful' handles we have for things out there in the world. They're really irrelevant and a massive distraction to what we're really doing in photography. So what is it that I think we're trying to do in photography?

Well, a number of things actually. But perhaps the most important one is that we're trying to make sense of the world, to distill what we see in front of us, down into a digestible, accessible message. We wish to compartmentalise what we see down into something we can understand, and that hopefully everyone else will too. We do this by using maths (spacial distances between related objects within the frame), and by mood (dark tones convey a sense of mystery or low feelings, while brighter tones are more uplifting and transparent).

But ultimately, everything we see within the frame is a tone. It is somewhere between absolute black and absolute white. I honestly wonder sometimes - if we could paint onto the sensors / film of our cameras what we want, we would. We're just dealing in tones.

So am I suggesting we all start working in black and white? Sort of, but not quite, but yes. I am.

Recently, while I was in Lofoten, one of my clients - John - was working with his D800 camera and I noticed he was working with his live-view screen set to black and white only.

I loved this.

To me it was the perfect summary of what it is we're trying to do as photographers.

What John was trying to do, was consider the tones in front of him. By removing the colour element, he was able to be more focussed on the tonal relationships before him, and the form they convey throughout the scene. By working with a black and white preview screen, he was abstracting.

Photographs aren't about scenery, they're about form and tone.

I began this discussion by presenting a white landscape (snow), to illustrate how we can reduce our photography down to the absolute zero in terms of content to a frame, and if we're good at it, we can make stronger images. I feel working in blank landscapes such as snow and beach locations can help us fine tune our photography. We start to realise we don't need much, and everything that is put into the frame should have a purpose.

Like Mark Hollis fromTalk Talk said "Before you play two notes learn how to play one note - and don't play one note unless you've got a reason to play it." The same holds true for photography. We must distill our image making down to what it really is, and it's not about scenery, it's about form and tone. Start with less form and work up from there is my advice.

Black Canvas

Several months ago, I wrote a blog posting about tonal relationships in photographs, and how dark areas of a frame create mystery. This was all spurred on by something I read in Galen Rowell's excellent book 'Inner game'. In it, he had envisioned a time in the future when something like HDR would arrive and he (correctly) suggested that with the power of such a tool, it would be very easy to remove all depth and mystery from an image. He died in 2001, so this was well before the advent of HDR.

But the main point that Galen wrote about in his article, was that he felt that dark areas of an image convey a sense of mystery, because as part of our primal instinct is to associate dark with danger. For example a dark cave or a dark forest would be considered a possible threat to our ancestors.

I bring all this up, as a precursor to what I'd like to discuss in this post.

Dark areas in a photograph should be considered as a welcome dimension, if they do not disturb the harmony of the rest of the image.

A few days ago, I discussed how using Snow in a photograph can create a sense of having a blank canvas, a space where the eye can float freely away (or over). Snow can simplify or distill our compositions down, reduce the landscape to the core elements that we wish our viewer to be attracted to. Similarly, black areas of a frame can be used in exactly the same way.

Take the above shot of my 'ice seal', shot in Iceland in 2011. Part of my attraction to a scene is often the lack of clutter around any interesting objects. This little sculpture was sitting on the beach separated from other ice debris. The black beach acts as a kind of 'filler' or blank canvas, pretty much in the same way as snow does. If anything it seems that there is a rule here - large areas of black act exactly the same way as large areas of white snow do. What this comes down to is recognising that spaces we encounter in a landscape can be put to just as much good use as the main objects of interest. If a photograph could be compared to a musical score, we would say that it's not just the notes of the melody that are important, it's the spaces between them as well.

I've always been intrigued that most photographers go looking for scenes with far too many things going on in them. It seems to be a natural conclusion that when we first think about landscape photography, we think about what we want to include in a shot, and seldom do we consider what we wish to exclude. Composing is partly an act of editing on location.

But when we do find good compositions, it's often because we have isolated out a few key objects in the scene for interest. It takes us a lot longer to learn to really see all the remaining clutter that was also present in the scene. So often do we return home only to discover that the scene we recorded, contains additional distracting elements that we never saw whilst there. This happens because we are selective in what we choose to 'see' at the point that the image was made. It takes years to begin to really see beyond what we have been attracted to, and notice subtexts. So in essence, landscape photography is a difficult thing to master, mainly because we have decided to start off with too many things competing for our interest within the frame. This is at odds with how many people find empty landscapes intimidating. I've often heard participants express a feeling of being overwhelmed by too little going on in the frame, when I have often believed that the less you have to worry about - the easier it should be to make an effective photograph.

Blank empty spaces in our landscape should be considered as inviting spaces to work in. They should be easy to work with, rather than hard, because we are trying to juggle a lot less than we would be, if we had to worry about numerous objects, each with their own conflicting shapes and tones.

Lastly, let's consider what a black canvas is for us, compared to a white canvas. I find snow scenes generally uplifting. The degree of bright tones within the frame convey a sense of openness and transparency. Darker images, like my 'ice seal' photograph do not. The adage that 'white reveals, and black conceals' is true. Black presents a less optimistic mood, and I often feel the images convey a less uplifting mood to them. So tones are an important element of our compositions, but I often feel they aren't considered until we are back home, viewing our image on a screen. It seems that while we are out in the landscape, we aren't entirely able to convert what is in the frame of our camera's eye piece into an abstraction (i.e photograph). We're still holding on to the notion of scenery to a degree. We may recognise objects, shapes and patterns and may have constructed a meaningful composition around what we've found, but all too often, we don't recognise the tonal aspects of what we have. A tree line across a snowy landscape can look like a line of trees while we are there, but when we're back home looking at the image on a computer screen, we see a black caterpillar crawling across a white piece of paper. Our line of trees have turned into something all together different from what we saw, because we did not understand that trees will render muddy and dark when encompassed by a much brighter tone (in this case, snow).

Maybe that's something for a further post.

White Canvas

Last year, on my Bolivia trip, Jezz said to me 'it's not that you like snow Bruce, it's just that you like white'.

I think Jezz hit on something with his humorous comment.

I do like white.

Over the past few years, as my photographic style has simplified, it's as if that 'white' that Jezz speaks off, has become something I seek, because it has a few properties about it that I find are an aid to my compositions and inspiration.

Like a blank canvas, these white spaces allow me to reduce the content of the frame down to the most elemental building blocks. Less objects in the frame can often suggest a much simplified view.

But these white spaces also allow the objects that I do include in the frame to be more separated out; for them to have breathing space around them. This breathing space implies a sense of calm to the photograph.

Snow is the epitome of space and 'nothingness'. Which is why I think I'm often attracted to the colder regions. There is something unblemished about Snow and Ice. It rarely has the mark of man on it, and through it, we are allowed to place upon it our own visions of what is or isn't there. And that's what space in photographs does for us - it allows us to have more freedom to conjure up our own thoughts and dreams.

So although Jezz thinks I like white, I really like space. Space in a photograph allows for things to be more calm. Space also allows for the image to be more simplified. Space is good.

But it's not just Snow that gives us this. We can reach similar levels of space and simplification by using other surfaces. Large areas of sand on beaches is another example, and so too is anything that has a simple texture and area to it with almost no break to its own continuity. This continuity I speak off, allows the eye to pass over, to float by and head towards the subjects we do wish the viewer to rest their eyes upon.

By isolating out regions of the landscape where it seems as though nothing is going on, we can create images where it feels as though there is more going on than meets the eye. Less is more. And by removing distracting tones, or overly complex structures in our images, we reduce our message down to one that is concise. Our message becomes much easier to digest, and more coherent as a result. Good images have often simple, but strong messages.

Yes, space in the landscape is good.

Finding Inspiration through Concepts

Everything around us has meaning. It is up to us to see that meaning, and to apply some form of structure to it. I often feel as though my whole photography career to date, has been one based on intuition. It’s quite a radical departure from how one often navigates through the waters of life: We see what we want, and we strive to reach it. We often decide upon a path and try as best as we can to get onto that path and follow the direction we wish to take. I think this is a matter of force, rather than a matter of flow.

Living a creative life means being open to possibilities, and things happening along the way that you didn’t expect. These surprises are often gifts, a sign of a new direction we should explore in our creativity, rather than obstacles, as we often see them. But it’s really up to us whether we choose to do so. Nothing should be set in stone.

However, there is maybe one aspect of creativity that is a little bit different from this, and that’s the notion of a concept. Oftentimes, concepts come to me slowly - either by seeing a pattern in the work I’ve created to date and realising there is a story there to be explored and unfolded. Other times I have a strong sense of what it is that I wish to convey and this moulds the direction of the work I am taking. But mostly I feel, it is a combination of both. The work guides me, shows me where it is going, and I begin to apply a sense of structure to it. I often like to think this is part creative and part analytical - it’s me utilising two different aspects of my character. Sometimes one of them is more dominant than the other; I seem to feel I can be very loose in what I’m creating, like it’s really rather irrelevant and when I find something of substance within the randomness of my creations, I will move into a more structured way of assembling the pieces, looking for coherence in what I’m doing.

I feel my latest book was very much like that. What started out as a terrible trip to Iceland in the summer of 2011, catapulted me into creating a thematic piece of work. I wasn’t aware during that summer that what I’d captured was perhaps a very strong set of images. It hadn’t even dawned on me at the time that there was a strong story waiting to be sifted and filtered and brought into focus once I’d done reviewing all the transparencies I’d created.

It was only once I’d done the editing stage that I realised I had something concrete, something perhaps stronger than the sum of its parts. It surprised me even to know I’d created such a thing because I never saw it, never envisaged it at the time of capture. I had no preconceptions about what I was doing, and I think that’s really important when creating things. You have to go with the flow and just accept what happens.

Six months later I felt I wanted to put a book together about these black sand beaches, but I didn’t feel I had enough material. I also felt there was no theme at hand for them. I toyed with the idea of calling it all ‘black sand white ice’, but that just didn’t sound elegant enough for me. If the title isn’t elegant, then it’s unlikely that the concept behind it is either. After a few workings I came up with the notion that all my images of Iceland to date had been created during the nocturnal hours. There was now the sense of a concept behind the images. The work had dictated the concept, and in turn the concept dictated how I would lay out the content of the book and in particular, the tone of the text that would be included inside it.

The text inside this book you see, is rather a little dreamy. It’s less of a ‘how I made this shot’, and more a case of expressing how I felt, and how I interpreted what I saw. Actually, now that I think about that, how I felt and how I interpreted my landscape is in fact a description, or maybe an understanding of the motivations I had to create the work. For instance, I often found some of the ice sculptures to be like animals, some of them were metaphors for the icelandic landscape. One in particular looked like an ice-seal, and there are often seals swimming around the coast line. So I think the 'dreamy' text does indeed explain how the work was created. But overal, Iceland is a dreamlike landscape, one which needs to be absorbed and considered, and I wanted to reflect that very much in the text.

I’d also like to stress that I don’t see myself as a photographer. I feel that’s too much of a label, and it’s perhaps a limiting one. We are creative people. We create things, and I emphasise this point, because I feel that my iceland book is not a book of photographs. It is a concept, something to be considered as a whole.

I found the images seem to dictate the theme and that theme dictated how the book should look. For instance, Darren (my book designer friend) and I discussed the colour of the cloth at length because we felt it should be similar to the volcanic dark sands found in Iceland. Everything was a decision based upon a theme. I felt I was creating a piece of art in some way, rather than a book, and the photographs were only the beginning of it. Why stop at creating the images, and hand over the rest of the design to someone else? Surely you should be involved in how your work is conveyed, reproduced and how it is presented? Surely you have a say in how you feel it should all be wrapped up? And most importantly, you will know how it should be presented, because you understand the theme or concept behind your work.

So what now? Well, at the moment I feel I have pretty much a clean slate. It's quite liberating to feel that I can close off a piece of work, and now forget about it. The iceland book was perhaps quite an absorbing project to be involved with. Things run their course, and I can now happily say it's finished and I'm already looking forwards to other projects I have in the back of my mind. I've started looking at some of my other work, to see if I can find a theme, a concept of some sort, and I think I've begun that process. It's rather exciting to feel that one thing leads to another, and by simply being open and experiencing my existing work in a new way, I can see something lurking, waiting to be pulled out and developed. Maybe something new will come of it. I really don't know, and I guess that's what's so great about the creative process, things often have a way of taking on a life of their own.