So my 365 project has officialy concluded, as of a week ago. Well it will have when I get my last few rolls of film dev'd and scan and scan and upload everything. Updates have been few and infrequent the past few months. Hence this post.
From Chuck Close in "Wisdom"
"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case."
I'm so guilty of this syndrome, sitting around waiting for the right idea to find me. So, uni or not, life or not, I need to keep working at this. So I think I should keep up the photo a day business for some time. I doubt I'm disciplined enough to keep getting one photo every day, but I need to keep up the commitment to work, rather than commitment to finding inspiration.
So watch this space - by the end of next week, you should see the last of my 365 project up here.
Monday, April 18, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
A Little Retrospective
So it's day 296 today, and I'm feeling a little retrospective with 69 days to go. Without getting too much of my artist-wank on (where did I put my beret?...)
I've been thinking about this project and what it's taught me and such things. When I started, I thought this project was about motivation - denying yourself the excuse to not take that photo you see because you don't think it will come out well, or it's too much effort, or it's just kinda pointless. This was meant to cut through that, and it has. But recently, I was reading a book that got me thinking about it in a different way. Art is meant to be produced in great quantity, and that doing so is not just playing lottery. That placing an emphasis on quality over quantity is to ultimately stop progressing. After all, the key to quality is experience and expertise. Which only comes from a good deal of practice.
My point is not that I think I'm just trying to churn out photos, but that I feel like the project is letting me progress in a very different manner to what I expected. I wondered in the past if I was better off trying to do one really polished photo a week - I may still take that up in the future, but I'm very glad I opted to do a 365 project instead.
Working with film has been really, really interesting so far. I haven't done much digital work at all since I've picked it up seriously, and I'm ok with that for the minute. I'm not near a final judgement on it, but I will say a few things about it. It feels very different to have your pictures be produced as a physical thing straight away. It has required me to be a lot more meticulous with my workflow than digital ever did. And it has made it a lot more interesting to look back at some 'master' photographers of the past, because it has given me a far greater sense of the processes they use and such.
Anyways, after my update today I was feeling a little retrospective, so there you go. Some photographic thoughts for the day.
I've been thinking about this project and what it's taught me and such things. When I started, I thought this project was about motivation - denying yourself the excuse to not take that photo you see because you don't think it will come out well, or it's too much effort, or it's just kinda pointless. This was meant to cut through that, and it has. But recently, I was reading a book that got me thinking about it in a different way. Art is meant to be produced in great quantity, and that doing so is not just playing lottery. That placing an emphasis on quality over quantity is to ultimately stop progressing. After all, the key to quality is experience and expertise. Which only comes from a good deal of practice.
My point is not that I think I'm just trying to churn out photos, but that I feel like the project is letting me progress in a very different manner to what I expected. I wondered in the past if I was better off trying to do one really polished photo a week - I may still take that up in the future, but I'm very glad I opted to do a 365 project instead.
Working with film has been really, really interesting so far. I haven't done much digital work at all since I've picked it up seriously, and I'm ok with that for the minute. I'm not near a final judgement on it, but I will say a few things about it. It feels very different to have your pictures be produced as a physical thing straight away. It has required me to be a lot more meticulous with my workflow than digital ever did. And it has made it a lot more interesting to look back at some 'master' photographers of the past, because it has given me a far greater sense of the processes they use and such.
Anyways, after my update today I was feeling a little retrospective, so there you go. Some photographic thoughts for the day.
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