Oh, for fuck’s sake! Look here, you (and by “you” here, I mean me, obviously) – I just ran across this post from 2014… geezly crow, I didn’t have to scroll back all that far to find it either.
The thing is, you see, and I think I’ve mentioned it before. I’ve started teaching my hunny to shoot now. It turns out he loves birds and of course birds and photography go hand in hand and he’s a real natural because of course he fuckin’ is. He’s also one of the most artist people I know and he picks up whatever creative thing he wants to do really easily and gets tired of it really quickly. One of the lucky ones, really.
But now he really understands what I’m saying. And one of the reasons I struggled so much all those many years ago with whether or not *I* was an artist is because I struggle SO SO much with creative things. I start them off easily enough, but I always hit a wall pretty quickly and no matter what any one tries to teach me or show much I just can’t get passed it.
With Photography I did. Except photography is a weird little thing, right. Because it’s very tech heavy, very pay to play as it were. So photographers have this in-community argument all the time – are photographers artists, or are they merely documenting the world around them? Is a good photographer one who takes photos faithful to reality or one that manipulates a scene – either in reality by posing subjects or manipulating the light or by doing so using a computer or a darkroom – to take a photo faithful to the perceived reality (because the reality of the thing is that humans don’t see things the way that a camera sees things and there’s a debate to be had about if humans have the right view or cameras do). Anyways, it’s a whole thing. Are we documentarians or are we artists? Is it enough to technically capture an image proficiently or must you be communicaitng something artistically as well?
For me, it needs to communicate something artistically. I’ve seen more than enough technically perfect photos that are dull as shit. That are somehow dull and lifeless when they absolutely shouldn’t be. I’ve seen enough photos that have so many flaws but are still gorgeous and moving that I cannot argue they are anything less than brilliant. So I’m on the side of artistic photography. And there are folks on the side of technical photography and they are free to go off and do that but I’m not gonna look at it more than I have to.
So there, that’s it. Because this is how I VIEW images, this is how I TAKE images, and thus, I’m an artist. And for so many years I did not even REALIZE that no matter my struggles and difficults and all these other things… the only reason I ever even struggled was because I was already an artist. Otherwise I would have been content that I had already, indeed, operated a paintbrush proficiently instead of bemoaning that it didn’t move me.
Things get so much simpler the older you get – it’s all that damn experience I reckon.