One of my workshop attendees sent me an interesting piece by Sean Kernan on the process and role of criticism, at www.seankernan.com/html/articles/criticism.html. It made me think about my own process of growth, and the tension between being a commercial photographer and someone who is trying to push my own boundaries. My success as a commercial shooter is contingent upon replication--I am hired to do the same thing over and over. My economic life is dependent upon regular praise for it. But without my alternate life as an artist, pushing at new ways of seeing, the commercial work would quickly become stale.
This new tool in my life, the digital camera, is not some gateway to vastly expanded creativity. It’s just another camera. I like that I can blaze away and shoot without consuming gobs of film. I hate that the end result is so hard to handle—it’s a thumbnail in a computer program, and it’s a lot of work, that I don’t know how to do very well yet, to make it become a finely crafted object. So my attention lately is riveted by technique. The technical aspects of photography are important only in how they serve the fulfillment of a vision. Those aspects are not to be disregarded, but they are also not to be confused with the meaning of the work.
Comments