It's Monday Morning and Photography is Simmering Nicely. Here are a few thoughts about the biz/art.

Afradet.

I've been so side-tracked by non-photo stuff lately that when I finally had the opportunity to do some fun, personal  work I felt a bit paralyzed and this led me to meditate a bit about the nature of sustaining my motivation to do my own, personal work. Cash flow is obviously a powerful motivator for doing the commercial work but after 40 years or so of shooting personal work it's interesting to understand the ways to keep a current or pulse of inspiration going during times of sloth or times of stress, or just during normal life. Mostly it's about honoring the work you feel most compelled to do for yourself.

I've always had the good fortune to make my own schedule and to lard in plenty of free time in which to play with my photography. Lately though life changed a bit, tossed in a quite a few curve balls and caused me to need to pay rigorous attention to things outside my areas of expertise (if they exist). I've learned a bunch more about banking, investing, elder care issues, probate law, and finance in general. 

I've spent a lot of time arranging care and participating in care for family members. But when one part of life gets detailed and takes more time something has to give. For me, in the last three months it's been my own, selfish, personal photography work. Perhaps that explains my buying outburst of ancient Nikon products.... A projection of the desire to grab back my previous freeform engagement with the craft...

Now that I've engineered a quantum more free time I still feel hobbled because as the little gems of my free time get more precious the artificial and self-imposed demand to become more picky with the resources I have left sets up some sort of false paradigm that pushes me to take everything more seriously. Or too seriously. What is photography, as a passion, if it's not laced with fun? Schedule be damned!

After much thought it was clear that my interest in photography is almost solely related to making images of people. At one point, reviewing my older work, it seemed that I was really most interested in studio portrait; encounters in which I had the main share of control --- at least technically --- but on reflection it's always just been about having the intimate interchange with the person on the other side of the camera, however fleeting and coming away with prints and other constructions with which to share the emotion and theatre of the interchange with an audience.

Brooks Jensen at Lenswork Magazine conjectured in one of his essays that the work his magazine sees fit to publish comes from people who have a depth of work in the genre they have come to focus upon with a sense of purpose. In his research he finds that the most interesting work has either come from people who have put in the time to evolve and then perfect a vision, with years of work and development,  or from the people who dive deeply and with almost single-minded application to their work; especially if they are pursuing a contiguous project. The people who do not get published are the people who sample every kind of image making, making glancing approaches to different styles and subject matter but without the requisite endurance of a singular vision. Aimed at a single kind of subject.

Resistance to doing your important artistic work is strong, according to writer, Stephen Pressfield. When I am really stuck and have photographer's block then, ironically, I waste a bit of time (not really a waste) re-reading Pressfield's, The War of Art, and my renewed understanding of my own resistance to doing my work abates for a while and I actually get good things done. 

My work is really about making images of people I find interesting, captivating, beautiful, strange and wonderful. The reality of life is that these subjects aren't available on short notice, they aren't sitting in a small room somewhere just waiting for my phone call. Since my schedule is variable and, to a certain extent connected to the whims of my clients and other chance responsibilities, it's not always possible to have a delightful person in front of me when I have a fleeting amount of open time available. My dodge over the years has been to grab a camera and go walking. I'm always hoping, on some level, that I'll meet someone during the course of my walk who needs to be photographed by me and somehow understands the value of the chance meeting and who emphatically wants to pose for me if for no other reason than to have moments of spontaneous exercise of their own subtle performance art. It's a pipe dream that rarely has fulfillment. 

But I walk and I shoot for the sake of shooting and then return home like a net fisherman examining the contents of my erratically flung net to see if anything interesting wandered into the catch while my brain wasn't paying attention. And it's gone on this way for years. 

This morning, over pancakes and scrambled eggs and sausage and hot coffee I realized that the majority sum of my "street photography" was a ruse to assuage my own psychic complicity with resistance to getting more organized, identifying the people I want to photograph and to move those studio or environmental portrait encounters to fruition. In a sense, for me, I'm beginning to see modern, random street photography as a place holder or addictive substitute for the photography I consider "real." The photography I should be doing.

Street shooting days have become peppered with ennui. It's like watching a video of Kai reviewing a camera on YouTube and of him taking random shots in the streets of normal people in interesting cities in order to show off some feature or performance aspect of some camera; the work is numbingly the same but, surrounded by his spoken (and sometimes humorous) manifestos you can almost see something interesting in it. But in the end it's just entertainment for his audience and a placeholder of the real photography he would no doubt love to be doing instead. 

The more I dabble across genres the less I get done. 

Leaving the house without a plan and a project is like shooting off an unguided missile in an unknown direction. it will get messy. It probably won't be productive. 

One of the things I hate about thoughtful writers like Brooks Jensen is that if I read carefully I almost always see where it is that my resolve has fallen apart. His words sometimes lay bare the shortcomings of my discipline. I generally always resolve to do something but sadly it's not always the thing I wish I were doing or need to be doing. 

I guess that's the nature of this whole undertaking. 

Bottom line today? If you are moving between making images of cats, then flowers, then buildings, then street scenes and then baby pictures and then food and then back to cats you might not really be doing photography, you may just be systematically testing your camera and lenses along with the state of your skill set. You could do that until you die but you might be better off thinking about what it is you are really interested in and finding a way to pursue that. 

I've got some mental organizing to do. I'll get on it just as soon as I finish my paying job at the golf course this afternoon. I hope the wind dies down, I'd like to use a softbox for some of the outside portraits....

It's Monday. This is probably the extent of my "deep" thoughts for the week.