Originality

* I suggest you take the time to find the largest monitor you can, and then click on the images below to see them as large as possible.  If you have the ability to calibrate your monitor, do it.  If the images appear too light, or too dark, your monitor needs to be calibrated.  Deep and luscious are the only words I have to describe the color of these images.I imagine that any person who works in the arts hopes for some originality in their work.  In the visual arts, to which photography belongs, if you have an educated eye you know it when you see it.  It transcends style, yet sometimes comes across as style.  No one confuses a Giacometti, whether it’s a sculpture, painting or drawing, for anyone else’s work.  Yet it’s the result of the way he saw the world, not the application of a style.   It’s why we can see Picasso in a Picasso, whether it’s a cubist painting, surrealist sculpture, later modern work or a realistic free-hand drawing.  You see his original vision in his work.  The same holds true for Matisse, Rembrandt and so many other greats.  While I’m no expert on music, I’ve listened enough to occasionally hear something new and know it’s Mozart.  

Much of the work Ann and I do with photography is working on the craft of photography - how to make sure you get a high quality image - and placing ourselves in great locations at great times to get striking images.  And while many of those images may be incredible, often they are not very original.  Yes, I see the world in a particular way so my images are occasionally very different from Ann’s, but often they are quite similar.  I’ve never been too adventurous in my image making and I continue to embrace the tradition of straight photography, so I doubt the images I make will differ radically over time.  The one thing Ann and I do not try to do is to be “unique.”  You’ll find photographers of all sorts who find some sort of technique or approach that yields a visually grabbing image that is the result of how unusual the resulting image is (think extreme HDR, fisheye lenses, super-high contrast, stop-motion images).  They’re somewhat odd, unusual and/or interesting the first few times you see it.  But then after awhile the effect fades and there is really nothing original about the seeing that led up to the image.  Originality in seeing is rare.  It doesn’t depend on a single trick or technique and, I suspect, you never quite know that’s what you’re doing when you’re taking the first steps down that path.

A couple of weekends ago Ann and I spent a long weekend at Bandon, Oregon on the coast. It is one of the photographic Meccas in Oregon. High tide variation on sandy beaches with lots of interesting rocks to use as subjects. A photographer I’ve been reading lately, Bruce Percy, said that the hardest thing to do is to go to a well-photographed place and to get images that don’t look like everyone else’s. He’s right. That was true at Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons (Just how different could my sunrise images at Horseshoe Bend be than those of the other 50 photographers lined up along the Snake River’s bank?), and would be true at Bandon. Yet there is a reason these places attract photographers (they’re beautiful and full of interesting things) and I was going to see what I could do there.

Bruce’s images are some of the most original photographic images I’ve seen in a long while. (Check out http://www.brucepercy.co.uk/) He sees things in a particular way, with a measured and composed approach that I relate to. So I’ve been reading several books he’s written that discuss his thinking and the techniques he uses to transform what is out there to what he sees in a final image. And I decided that I was going to go to Bandon with the purpose of trying to see things in a slightly different way; to simplify my images to see if that expands my ability to see. I didn’t mention that to Ann because we tend to joke about folks who are too artsy-fartsy about photography. This was an internal process for me; in short, a learning trip with minimal expectations.

I learned a lot and think I made some quality images.

But this post is not about the images I made that weekend. All of the images from this post are Ann’s. Not mine.

While I was on a very conscious quest to work on my seeing, Ann just went out and saw. And photographed what she saw. And it is original.

You can go on Google Images and type in Bandon, Oregon. You’ll see a plethora of fine images. Most of them brilliant sunsets with silhouetted rocks rising from the sea. Many of them will have a large rock or kelp strand in the foreground, made with a camera and wide-angle lens a mere inches above it, to create a dramatic foreground/background relationship and utilizing leading lines to draw the eye throughout the frame (that “look” has become so commonplace that I feel guilty every time I use it). None of it original. None of it looks like Ann’s images. Images she made over three mornings of photographing. Not some fluke shot. A consistency of original vision she kept at over several days.

While I’d been impressed with some of the images I saw in our hotel room in Bandon when we did our nightly downloading of images, the significance of what Ann had done didn’t really hit me until we were home and she kept working on the images.  

Over the next couple of weeks she’d call me in and ask, “What do you think about this one?”  Again, and again, and again.  At one point she asked me, “These aren’t too weird are they?”  Ann was concerned that, because they looked so different than other photos of Bandon she’d seen that they were somehow bad.  I had to explain to her that they were the exact opposite.  They weren’t weird, they were original.  They weren’t different just to be different, they came from the fact that she saw the place differently than I or anyone else that I know of, and that she brought that out in her photographs.  I launched into a long discussion about originality in seeing (which led to this post), to different photographers and artists, and how that really is the ultimate goal of the artists that I care about most.  To see the world in different, unique and original ways, and then to photograph it.

I described how her landscapes captured the alien quality of Salvador Dali’s landscapes (I used the term “Daliesque”) without the melting clocks, heads on crutches or strange animal forms.  That her images convey an unearthly environment with objects within a vast landscape that create a visible presence of place.  Original.

Although Ann will poo-poo the notion that, at times, I will feel a tinge of jealousy when I look at a particularly beautiful image that she made, one I never even saw, while we were out photographing together, it happens.  At her best she can create a beautiful, visually complex yet simple images where I only struggle with chaos.  And I’m jealous when that happens, because I know that if I had been patient enough, focused enough and attentive enough, I too could have made that image.  

Not here though.  When I started seeing that there were quite a few of these images I knew they were Ann’s images.  I could not have made them because they were the result of Ann’s unique way of seeing.  Instead of that “Damn! Why didn’t I see that!” feeling, I became excited.  (I think Ann probably thought I’d lost my marbles.)  I felt privileged to be at a special moment in time with Ann’s photographic development, and to be fully aware of it.  So I simply had to share a few of these images.  Because they are original.

The thing about the creative process is that it is a process.  It comes and goes; you move forward and then seemingly backwards.  None of these is a fluke image.  It’s not even a series of fluke images made on one glorious morning.  She made these over three different mornings.  The question remains whether she’s able to push this originality in seeing and photographing further, into different environments.  Maybe it becomes her way of seeing the world and photographing.  Others will see it as her style.  Maybe it becomes one of the several different ways she looks at the world.  Maybe she can’t replicate this seeing again, or can’t in any other context.  That is, in part, why we photograph.  To find these things out.

But for now, enjoy these images.

Side note:  Ann and I have been busy the past month or so.  At the request of several people (yes, in particular you Ryan), Ann and I have been working on putting together a website to show our photographs.  Call it Ann and Dan’s Excellent Photography Adventures if you wish, but folks have wanted to see more of our photographs than I’ve managed to post online on my blog site.  It shouldn’t be too much longer before it goes up, but in grand Ann fashion, she’s programming it so it isn’t just a place where we dump our images.  She’s incorporating different ways for people to look at more photographs if you want to.  At first it won’t have too many images, but it will motivate us to get what we’ve worked on up for others to look at and, at least I’m hoping for myself, to motivate me to polish some of the images I just haven’t gotten around to developing.  And don’t worry, this blog site will continue . . . wherever that next adventure lies.  In the past year I may have barely missed out on Kosovo, Liberia, and most recently Ethiopia, but I’m still determined to find a next overseas assignment.  That adventure will continue.

So keep your eyes out for the launching of the new photography site!  It shouldn’t be too much longer until it’s ready.