Why Study the Masters?

Today’s answer:  To better understand your own work.  

I’ve commented a few times that I’m trying to study a different photographer each month this year.  So far, I’m on track and it’s been worth it.  Based upon the number of times I’ve referred to Joe Cornish in my posts, you’ve probably figured out that my time studying him was worth it.  It was.  In fact, I have to admit that most of the successful imagery (as well as the unsuccessful stuff - but no blame to him, I was trying to push my image-making ) is due to little things I picked up from studying Joe’s work.  This month’s photographer, Michael Kenna, has been a bit tougher to embrace.

You might think that, looking at his images I’d be immediately attracted to them.  I am generally, given their clean, graphic nature.  However, the first book I studied -  his Twenty Year Retrospective - somehow didn’t connect with me initially.  I found his images interesting, but not compelling, and I was left wondering why.  Well, that was until I got to the final grouping of images with included quite a few taken in Dearborn, Michigan.  They blew me away!  Everything just seemed to come together in those images.  So I knew I had to keep at it with him, and maybe something would work its way through to me.

Which leads to yesterday morning.  4:45 am, Ann is off to work, I have a fresh cup of coffee beside me and Michael Kenna’s “Images of the Seventh Day” on my lap.  I’m not to the images yet, because I know well enough that I’m not just a visual learner.  I want to know what the artist (well, most artists) have to say about their work (and in writing, they’re less inclined to be . . . long winded) and, more importantly, about their creative process.  Given my curiosity, I also want to know what others have to say about a photographer’s work.  Well, usually I do.  This morning was, well, grueling.  

I’ll lead off by saying that I’m sure that something got lost in the translation from Italian to English . . .  cough, cough.  But my gawd!  I endured a pompous, overly-academic, I know more words than you and are more eloquent in my writing than you could ever hope (both true, by the way) article that left me exhausted.  Might I say a long winded gas bag?  Still, I managed to wade through the literary, artistic and photographer references  to come out with some semblance of what, I think, the writer was trying to say.  Though I wonder if Kenna would say the same stuff about his work that the writer did?  

So I turned to the images and very quickly realized I was too brain-fried to really study them.  So I skipped through the book to get a feel for the range of images in them, especially since they include images from an additional decade after the Twenty Year Retrospective.  Then I saw a biography in the back!  Great - even more words!  But I couldn’t help myself.

Which was a good thing, because it led me to the following quote by Michael Kenna:

“In my photography I consider myself much closer to Basho than to Joyce! In other media, too, I am attracted to seemingly ‘unfinished’ works that are not full of information. [I like audience participation, in my work and in others.  When I don’t feel invited], I begin to feel disconnected, no matter how awesome the artwork or the artist’s genius might be.”  

It wasn’t like a light-bulb went off in my head, it was more like being hit with a brick!

One of the questions I ask myself when reviewing my own and other’s images is, “Why does it work?”  Often the analysis (is there ever really an answer?) involves composition, light, moment, subject.  But sometimes a subject works despite failings in all of those technical areas, or, even more importantly, transcends the masterful execution of all of the above.  The something more!

Which brings me back to a theme in my work that has continued to defy the “why does it work” question.  The types of images that leave me hanging on that question often arise from the compositions I’m compelled to do, but even finds its way into landscape images.  

Why does it work?  Because it leaves enough unanswered to engage the viewer.  

So why study the masters?  To better understand your own work.