Complete Contemplative Portfolio

I am experiencing continuing technical difficulties with creating an actual DVD, so I decided to go ahead and post my final portfolio project for Contemplative Photography on the web. (For regular visitors, the first slideshow is the same one that appeared in the previous post)

Portfolio Intro "Taking Stock":

Reflections on artistic process
In the process of putting together this portfolio, I've been thinking a lot about the connection between the process of creating photographs and the process of writing poetry. I majored in English as an undergrad, with a concentration in creative writing, and spent a lot of time reading, writing, revising and critiquing poetry. The comparisons between the two forms are obvious in some ways: both are primarily concerned with using images to communicate a message or invoke a feeling, both rely heavily on metaphor, both can be done carelessly or with great attention.

At the same time, I'm also really appreciating the the differences between the experiences of writing and photographing. Sometimes I feel photography—despite the technical and artistic challenges of creating a good photograph—is somehow easier than poetry, in the sense that it is more direct. The process of poetry is a little bit like translating a feeling into an image, then translating that image into words, which have both intellectual meaning and musical sound. Of course, not all poetry works directly with images, but anyone who has taken an introductory creative writing class knows the tyranny of the “objective correlative”: “No ideas but in things!” I'd like to think that type of academic training, which encouraged me to constantly translate between feelings, ideas, images, and words, has influenced my photography through this semester.

More generally, through actively engaging with the photographic process this semester, I've come to see in poetry and photography a shared experience of craft and composition. One of the things I had been least excited about in anticipating this class was learning digital editing. It was something I dreaded; it seemed technical and also kind of dishonest (or maybe like cheating...as in, “I wasn't good enough to get the shot right the first time, so I'll just fix it in Photoshop”). So I was shocked to discover, maybe about halfway through the semester, that I love editing photos.

What I've realized now is, while some people can and do have a utilitarian attitude toward working with photos digitally, that the editing process can also be a careful process of loving attention; more like revising a poem than erasing a mistake. Just as I come to feel closer to and more invested in my poems as I work and rework them, I started to get very “into” my photos as I edited. As I engaged in the process of giving an image my full attention, looking for the promise in it, intuitively examining it for emotional resonance, and working to bring out that resonance, I felt that process itself was literally creative—making something new from the raw material of the image.

That experience of full attention is something I found evidence of as I looked through my photographs. I like to make pictures that focus on one thing, or evoke one feeling. There were a lot of my photos that involved getting down on eye level with subjects, walking around to see them from different angles, working to engage them in the space and create a sense of intimacy in the image.

I was also surprised to find that I liked working in black and white. As a person who absolutely loves color (as you can see in a couple of the color stills, evidencing the bright orange and red walls of my house), I always tended toward color photography. And while I still enjoy photographing in color, I found as I was pulling together images for the final project that it was the black and white versions of photos that really spoke to me. The light and shadow seemed to have a power of distillation that made the images more powerful. Just like poetry is prose distilled and made more potent, it felt to me that black and white photography could sometimes distill an image—strengthening it's emotional content by changing our relationship to it. Just like poetry is the familiar medium of words, made magic and unfamiliar through economy and craft.

Approaches and Values
As I worked on the portfolio and on this reflection, I went back to reread the introduction to my poetry portfolio that I wrote in 2002. I found one line that seems to almost anticipate the photographic approach I've discovered through this course. Six years ago, I wrote: “Generally, I prefer a poem that focuses on a single idea. To use another metaphor, if one thinks of a poem as a room, I would rather the poem be a dark room with one object in the middle under a spotlight, than a well-lit room filled with beautiful things, although both types of rooms have their merits.” Looking through the images I've created over the semester, I notice that, literally, that is how I like to photograph—focusing on one thing, under a (literal or figurative) spotlight. As I write this now, I also realize it's the way I like to interact with people—having one on one conversations rather than being in a group. I might even go so far to say that it's the way I've structured my life—putting down roots in one community, instead of traveling around to lots of different places for a little while.

I'd like to think that approach to photography, and to my life, says something about my values, and that it embodies the “respect, humility and wonder” that we have been talking about through the semester. In thinking about how I practice those values, I believe I need to be careful that the desire for focus and attention doesn't turn into a desire for control. I took a big lesson from the sand dollar photos, which were some of my favorites. The assignment was to try different kinds of lighting. Not knowing very much about lighting, I spent a whole morning just placing the sand dollar in different places in my apartment and playing with camera settings, rather than attempting to get some particular “shot” that I imagined or planned. My photos were much better when I just started taking pictures, and took a lot of them, and spent a lot of time with the subject...trying different angles, just playing around. As soon as I start thinking of how I “want it to look,” instead of just being open to how it does look, my photos start to feel pretentious and contrived. I sometimes face a similar struggle with poetry. My writing suffers when I try to be too clever, or start self-censoring, instead of just letting the words come.

So here I am at the end of the semester, with a little movie of images and quotation and music that is not what I set out to do, or what I imagined I would make, but just what happened when I let myself get involved with the images. I hope that the sense of intimacy with the world, deep attention, and poignancy that I feel when I look at these pictures together as a whole comes through to the viewer.

In addition to the portfolio, I wanted to go ahead and share a slideshow of some color photos I took over the course of the semester. These are more numerous, and harder to tie together into a whole, but I suppose the overarching theme is trying to find new ways of seeing what's around me--finding and defining ourselves in relationship to the world.