I’ve been thinking of working on a series of images, something other than what I’ve been involved in so far.
Landscapes. Although I’ve not shot more than two dozen pictures I don’t feel about them like I do about other landscapes. Rather than being specifically about land, they … are … feel like something about a connection between a place and its influence on its people.
Here is what I know – I intend to walk along particular roads in Tucson and photograph the Santa Catalina Mountains that loom just beyond the curtain on the city, just beyond the stretch of the houses and the roads, just beyond where man has made the land his own.
These mountains feel, to me, like both a spectacle to be seen and as a presence, omniscient observers attending to the hither and thither of the scuttling drama playing out at their feet.
No they are not themselves stupendous, world famous, gargantuan, old, or in any other way particularly special. They are probably something pretty close to average mountains as far as mountains go, but they are special here, in that they are omnipresent over Tucson. It is their shape and texture, accented by the light and weather, that serves as the visual backdrop to all earthly existence on this bit of the glove. In their quarters the sun rises each day, and on their flanks fade the day’s last rays. They are here in a way that seems so much larger than everything else around.
Even though I’ve tried to express what causes them to stand out to me, that makes photographing them important, I can’t make the lines of reason clear. Each passing idea offers a tenuous argument for why they are important, or what the relationship between their existence and ours might be, but they all fail to grasp some deeper connection. There is something about them there, and us here, that I hope to see, feel, and maybe to encapsulate just a little bit of with my camera.
The driving force behind wanting to make a series of exposures including the mountains . . . is obviously not something I can, nor want to, jam into words. There is something precious, and dare I say: true, honest, and pure (whatever that might mean) about wanting to create something without that *thing* being fully articulated, formalized, predetermined. {I felt the gnawing of ambiguities and loose phraseology unraveling as I wrote that last sentence and am compelled to qualify “predetermined”: any work of art is fully stillborn when the end result is a faithful replica of the words and thoughts that preceded it.} The work to be done should be a bit of a mystery, something that needs to be entered to be known.
Therein is the nugget that I’m digging to get at: that artwork is something that springs naturally from within yet not from “me”. When we become aware of that stirring within it is like feeling a fish in the water next to us (be it a goldfish or a shark), or like feeling a sudden shift in the air movement (whether you are locked alone in a closet or standing on the flanks of the Matterhorn, it matters not, all drafts are alike in that their sources lie beyond our senses). To put the statement in Freudian terms (anyone know what Freud has to say on the origins of Art? I should find out) art {inspiration, impetus, drive, motive, desire, whatever you may wish to call it} does not spring from the Ego§. You are much larger than your thinking mind, despite its shrill declarations to the contrary.
Because inspiration comes from outside of the thinking self, trying to manhandle it with the thinking self will always do it harm. Try to form that *thing* into words and sentences (at least ones that are gramaticaly sound and not nonsensical) and you will invariably trim some of it away.
It is a bit like this: imagine a ball, a sphere, in your mind. Now imagine trying to build a replica of that idea with nothing but a large pile of Legos. You will eventually get something that is round, and ball like, but there is no way you will ever get rid of the underlying squareness of the Lego parts and their incapacity to form together into a seamlessly smooth curved surface.
That’s what is going on when you jam your creativity into words, either in speech, or writing them out.
It is important, I believe even crucial, to cultivate a sensitivity and awareness of that *thing* that drives our thinking selves into doing all this beautiful stuff called art. Learn to feel it when it is small, when it is strong, and just as importantly when it is dead.
The difficulty comes in not instantly seizing upon in with our chattering brains, whose prolific ramblings virtually define what we consider “our life”, and thereby crushing it into words and prescriptive acts. It is difficult to resist that urge, either out of excitement for the newly forming idea or because we so often fail to engage with reality until after it has been digested and parsed linguistically. To feel that *thing* there, inside yet not “me” (the thinking, talking, wordy “me”), and fundamentally to learn to coexist so intimately with a relative unknown.
It is not enough, of course, to know that you wish, or have to, or must, or will – doing is the aim, it is the whole point. There is no call to arms without the accompanying campaign. How to engage with, or derive action from that interior melody, I fear say, is a whole other ocean to swim in and write about.
§ Whether then from the Id or the Superego, I dare not venture without first leaning more of the matter.