G. Steve Journal

Life

If there is a thread that runs through the posts in this blog it is the ongoing exploration of art, and beauty, intellectually vs. emotionally.  With that in mind, I came across a quote by the actor and comedian Charlie Chaplin that describes his view on the matter:

“What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.”

Dragonfly

During a recent radio interview, a book author paraphrased a haiku by the poet Issa and it struck me as a perfect metaphor for apprehending the natural world:

I look in the dragonfly's eye
and see the mountain over my shoulder.

Creative Fuel

I came across a provocative interview with celebrity portrait photographer Norman Seeff and enjoyed his response to the question:

Was anyone particularly challenging to photograph?

NS: Yes, me. I was the biggest challenge to my photography, in the sense that I had to shift my paradigm inside out once I began working in the arena of public personalities. My discovery was that true communication is emotion based -- emotions are the fuel of the creative process.[emphasis mine]

In the world I had come from emotions were considered to be an impediment to being objective. The very inner resources at the source of creativity, both imagination and emotion, were considered weak, irrelevant and embarrassing. And then I find myself in a new world where those fundamental resources of the creative process are the foundation out of which thoughtful creativity emerges. I had to begin learning the 101 fundamentals of how to create an intimate, emotional interaction between artists and it scared the s--- out of me.

Perfection

As cameras continue to get better and better, it's not surprising when we photographers become overly obsessed with performance: lens resolution, megapixels, DMax...etc. until we can't see the forest for the trees! At the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves that these tools, as good as they are, cannot provide the most vital component of any image - creative expression.  As Ansel Adams once remarked on the subject: "I've seen a lot of sharp photos and fuzzy concepts."

Here's a provocative observation from renowned cellist Yo Yo Ma on the subtle but important distinction between perfection and expression:

For Ma, the tedium of the flawless performance taught him that there is often a tradeoff between perfection and expression.  "If you are worried about not making a mistake, then you will communicate nothing," he says.  "You will have missed the point of making music, which is to make people feel something."