Seeking the Interesting
We say: “I want to be a writer,” or “I want to be a photographer”; or we say: “I want to take interesting photographs,” or “I want to write interestingly,” or “I want to be interesting.” This is itself interesting. What do we really want when we want such things?
I am trying to learn to take interesting or beautiful or otherwise worthwhile photographs (worthwhile meaning to me that they contribute to someone’s sense of reality or life, at any scale: the trivial, the profound, in between; they might be worthwhile in subject, in composition, in meaning, or in some technical aspect).
I am learning very slowly, despite kind advice from many talented acquaintances and substantial family history in photography. Today I drove around looking for things to shoot and, being what S. Stratodrive calls a ‘new jack,’ had as a discretionary mechanism only (1) what has seemed interesting in other, already-taken photographs and (2) the mildest and most banal internal sensibilities.
The immediate question: why am I trying to do this? If I do not already have something interesting to offer, why am I trying to learn how to offer something interesting? Am I not leading the horse with the cart, so to speak? The beginning of creative efforts is always strange in this way: before we can express something, we must sense that there is something we should express, something not otherwise explored; or is this too serious? Might we not simply have fun?
I am reminded of trying to write while in high school: perhaps I didn’t feel a compulsory or innate urge to say things; perhaps I merely wanted to write (to “be a writer”!) and selected things for the purpose; it is inevitable in such circumstances that one’s writing will be contrived, phony, pretentious (of course, mine remains so, but for other reasons now).
As a novice photographer I resort to the cheaper tricks of the form: massive Photoshop edits for color and composition, the exploitation of my subjects for the sake of the pictures, and so on. This seems comparable to me to the use of a thesaurus or the insistence on writing about the themes that automatically resonate with everyone whether or not your treatment is any good.
It is worth wondering what motivates one’s creativity, as the decision to pursue creativity professionally likely entails substantial material privation: if it is not compulsion but desire, not need but want, it is perhaps preferable to secure an ordinary job and make a hobby of your efforts. It worked for Kafka, after all.
I had a musicology professor who said that when he didn’t play the cello for a few hours each day, he felt unwashed; short of that sort of need, what will sustain you when you are hungry and no one wishes to date you in your dull poverty? When I heard him describe his addiction, I realized that dilettantism is preferable to falsified compulsion for me. Indeed, I wish we were more comfortable with the idea of craft rather than art, that there was a cultural sphere for semi-serious art. Is that the Internet?
It is more fun, more amusing, when one accepts the inauthenticity of oneself: a phony photographer trying to be interesting without any damn reason is more tolerable when he can laugh at himself, I hope; and the same should be true for a phony writer. It is all play, after all; perhaps, then, a disclaimer is in order: please know that the author of this site is comfortable with laughter.
