Planning for our workshop later this month has made me more attentive to the dialog that goes on in my head when I'm out shooting. Or rather, because I'm planning a workshop, I've started a dialog in my head to try and articulate what it is I'm observing in myself when I'm out shooting.
One of the places I visit a couple of times a week is Montlake Fill, about a mile from my house. It's one of the premier birding spots in the city, a former landfill that has an abundance of shoreline and brushy habitats. I always have my binoculars and my camera when I visit and, although looking for birds and looking for photographs are different ways to be in the landscape, I have no trouble flipping from one modality to the other.
Perhaps it is because I stand in these brushy spots for long periods of time looking for birds, the environment has embedded itself into my brain in a deep way. I engage the density of the landscape, and I find myself looking for ways to organize the complexity through the viewfinder.
These places pretty much look the same, just another messy, brushy place. Why do I stop at one spot, and not another? What draws me in?
It's not like I do any kind of preparatory ritual before I go out into the world. I don't meditate for an hour beforehand to open up my consciousness or cleanse my chakras. I don't have any kind of practice of that sort. Some people around me wish that I did. Ask Robin—I'm annoyingly absent minded most of the time. What does key me in is the camera, and I can, reasonably quickly and without thinking about it, zone into my surroundings intently just by looking through the viewfinder.
There's a signaling mechanism at work, and the best way I can describe it is that it's visceral. I feel it in my body. It's almost like a gravitational pull, and then I can go very deep, very fast. This arrangement of messy, twiggy brushy places, for whatever reason (and I don't particularly want to know the reason, I just trust that there's something there that I need to work on), pulls me in and I do a short dive into another kind of attention. I may see a particularly attractive combination of textures and that starts it, but I try and quickly move past the obvious photo in front of me. I'm seeing the frame, but I'm not composing exactly, I'm responding to the arrangement of shapes, now an abstraction, almost something apart from the real world I'm obviously engaged with. I feel a signal to press the shutter, and I do. It's like feeling warmer or cooler—this way's better, this way's worse, but I have no idea why. I let myself be guided by this intuitive directionality about where I should be shooting.
Lately I've been shooting fewer frames than I used to in these brief reveries in the brush, and going in and out of the state quicker. At the same time I've been consciously directing my attention toward a deeper complexity of form, layering the image, sometimes mashing leaves and sticks against the lens, and letting the image get messier and less coherent. I want to see photographs that I haven't seen before. It means I'm missing the mark more times than I hit it.
Which is fine. It is how I force growth. I allow a lot of room to fail.
The act of shooting is not the time to judge how you're doing. I never look at the screen while I'm taking pictures, except a quick glance at the histogram every now and again to make sure it's humped in the right place. I don't need nor want to know what I just did. I want to be available for what hasn't happened yet, and I cannot if my attention is elsewhere. I don't see the photographs until I load them onto the computer.
I want to make clear that I don't work this way only when I'm out in the landscape. It's pretty much how I make all my photographs, albeit with a lot more attention to making something happen that I know will work when I've got a client footing the bill. I depend on an intuitive, visceral approach for nearly all the work I do.
Yes it's visceral and intuitive. But it's visceral and intuitive based on 45 years of picture-taking. You have extremely well informed viscera.
R
Posted by: Robin Shapiro | January 02, 2008 at 04:08 PM