For nearly 40 years I have been involved in photography as a professional communicator supplementing his work with photos, as a photo journalist, a TV camera person and stringer for the major outlet to a national network, an active hobbiest and now, once again, a part time professional photographer.
Photography is one of those rare undertakings which is always in flux, always changing, growing, adapting and keeping pace with society and technology all at once. If it isn’t changes in lenses or shutter speeds, then it is changes to the recording medium (film to digital comes rushing to mind). But, despite the changes in technology, construction and practices one thing remains the same. No matter how it is captured — with a home made pin-hole camera to a $25,000 or more expensive medium format digital — that one constant is the capturing and saving of an instant in time created by the interplay of light on objects ranging from people to rocks and buildings, battleships and bath tubs, fashion models or car wrecks captured by light and shadow combined creates images seen and captured by the tools photographers use.
For nearly my entire career as active practitioner or avid amateur I had believed photography was merely mechanical, controlled by technologically savvy technicians. That philosophy has given rise to an often-repeated belief that “Photography in not Art” and “Photographers can not be considered Artists.”
After a prolonged period of soul searching I became aware of just how important photography is to me. I find myself viewing the world in shades of gray or in hues of vivid color. Great sunrises and sunsets always cause me to pause and enjoy. When I attend a movie screening, frequently it is the images, more than the plot or script, dialogue or cast of players that leaves the most lasting impression. The images, the images set the tone; create the feeling and influence the other senses to think, act and feel.
Photography is a unique past time, both mechanically demanding and artistically challenging. It is the only pursuit I can imagine which allows its practitioners to see with their eyes, sort with their hands, create with their hearts and speak in eloquent muted silence with their images.
Photography is an art. I am damned proud to consider my photography an art form. I am prouder yet to describe myself as one who wants to become an artist.
Pentax Spotmatic – yup, I am really that old, was a UV filter for my 50 mm. standard, 24 mm. wide angle and 135 mm. telephoto. The salesman, who later became a friend, said “If you can afford to buy the camera and equipment, you can’t afford not to buy UV filters.”
About a year later I was looking at some Ektachrome 64 slides shot in the Canadian Rockies near Banff, Alberta. I noticed some strange geometric light spots in the images. I was younger then, so the first thing I thought of was a stray UFO had happened into my image. But my buddy, (remember the guy who sold me the camera?) quickly dashed my illusions of the mysterious by identify the “lights” as lens flare. The flare, he told me was caused by reflection of sunlight into the lens elements.
The Sniper Hit His Mark
March 8th, 2009In every photo-magazine, every coffee table broadleaf photo book and in every paper back self improvement how to manual there always seems to be from a paragraph to a page of a photographer confessing poetically, waxing eloquently or just babbling on about the beauties of photography and the magic of the process which captures a moment in time and preserves it for ever more. Even I must admit to moments of weakness when I bought into the canned program and driveled on.
One Sunday afternoon as I was contemplating what kind of legacy I would leave behind in my body of writing and photography I discovered, much to my disappointment, I was pretty damned ordinary, unspectacular and yes, even a bit boring.
“That’s a pretty damned awful thought to harbour just one day after you turned 63,” I muttered to myself, flipping through another stack of photos. As usual in my life, when I started a search of this nature, I didn’t find proof of uniqueness, or anything different from the works of 100’s or thousands of other photographers. Those searches seemed to coincide with birthday hallmarks, like 25-years, 30 years, 45 years, fifty years and then 60. And the result of each one was always exactly the same, disappointment, boredom and frustration.
Then, unexpectedly, like the slug from a high velocity sniper rifle planted on a roof top miles away and aimed with deadly accuracy at my head, without the hint of a sound or a telltale muzzle flash my brain exploded with a Buddhist-like enlightenment.
I never found what I was looking for in any of my previous searches because I was looking in the wrong place for the wrong things. For more than 30 years I had succumbed to a false and I suspect phony philosophy.
With the flash of the exploded shrapnel of that sharpshooters’ slug lighting the dark recesses of my brain, I recognized something in myself. I recognized a limiting factor, a controlling attitude, and an abysmal misconception, which had not only prevented me for finding the quests of my previous searches, but had limited my ability to create, or once created to recognize the essence of my work.
With the revelation I was never who I thought I was and the unbounded excitement of an explorer who had just set foot on uncharted land, or an astronaut leaving mankind’s first footprint in the dust of an alien planet, I had discovered something new. Maybe just new for me, deep in the crevasses of my aging brain, but new and unexplored, none-the-less.
My photography, which until that moment of explosive enlightenment I had always felt to be passive, often unexciting capturing shades of lightness and shadow, colour and texture, always peaceful and well reasoned images in a normally polite package with no offense meant and rarely taken, frequently the politically correct act of semi-creation. In final form and presentation my works and my creative energies had targeted the creation of and prolongation of inoffensive thoughts, deeds and actions. In other words, they were safe.
That imagined sniper and his mind-manifested projectile had managed to rattle forth the controlling emotions that I believe have held me back and confined both my images and my writing to the sadly ordinary and perceptually mundane.
The choker to my creativity has been fear. It has been fear to let those outside my tightly knit circle of “safe” friends in. Fear to allow what I create to speak the emotions which drove me to create it. In short, in the period of a mental synapse, a mere nanosecond, the essence of my creative force became instantaneously known to me, without the clouding of doubt or blurring of confusion.
I am driven not by a desire to “make nice” and create pretty things, I live and work to bend the unbendable and to sculpt the unmalleable. My creative energy comes from a realization of how things are, not how they might be and a desire to set them right (in my terms and view of the world).
My energy is neither a product of a class action or a class battle. It is deeply personal. It is hidden so deeply inside me it has taken 63 years of “onion peeling” the layers of my existence to merely see it and the epiphany of blinding insight (triggered by a virtual projectile) to recognize and begin to understand.
The revelation: As a writer, and then again as a photographer I have beendriven by a boundless desire to control what I see around me. At first I used words, then graduated to images and later yet to elements of images to make (force) the world to comply with how I wanted it to be (look). At every opportunity I denied exactly what I worked to create, fearing such outspokenness would make both me and my works somehow less worthy.
The fuel for this drive has been both fear and anger. An intense fear of rejection of my works limited what I attempted to create. Anger and a deep sense of lack of control of all things surrounding me mentally locked me in a windowless cell.
That v1rtual bullet from the imagined sniper’s rifle held by a non-existent assassin on an unidentified building in a nameless town set me free.
Surprisingly, as I look back at images I thought were disappointing, as I allow myself to see inside the bottled emotions and desire for the exercise of control – with this new sense of personal understanding and discovery — I see my art in a new way and shout to all who will listen, “I am free.”
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