The path to fulfillment - and every so often to money and to greatness - begins with the realization that the artist has only to please him or herself. This is not to say that the work what you love now will be work that others will love, or will be work that you will love twenty years from now - or will be the work that defines you. Even Ansel Adams reprinted scores of his greatest images later in his life to reflect his own changing tastes and preferences.

The important thing is: It Doesn’t Matter. You build a portfolio best image by best image, or stone by stone, if you will. In photography, the beauty part is that, as you grow better and more confident in you art and in your technical skills, you can edit out the lesser work to make your portfolio an ever-changing, ever improving thing.

In so many fields those who do not work at their best are kidding themselves if they think they can save their best stuff for later.

Later is now.

Building a Portfolio One Stone at a Time
Frank Van Riper
LensWork No.46

According to the web logs visitors to my website come from all corners of the world - from Belgrade, Yugoslavia to Vancouver, Canada. That is amazing. Without internet the radius of distributions of my photographs would not have exceeded ten miles. On another side the number of the visitors can be counted with fingers on both hands. But quantity does not matter, what matters is quality. Mostly these are my friends. One of them from prosperous Silicon Valley has called me the other day, made praises to amount of writing which is coming out of me and asked: when do you have time to write all this? Commuter train, my friend, commuter train. One hour ten minutes to the office and one hour fifteen minutes back home. Every day. Business day. For the last eleven years. Plenty of time for thoughts and meditation. I wish I have started to write my blog earlier. How many bright ideas have been forgotten! Nothing is left but meaningless pieces of paper with scrabbled nonsense. Well, my train station is approaching. Adios! Till next ride!

One gloomy October afternoon I found myself on a Staten Island ferry going back to Manhattan. It was about to rain, low heavy clouds cloaked New York leaving no hope for sun, oozing sense of despair into a humid cold air. And then I saw a torch glowing with warm orange light. It was Statue of Liberty. I found a clear spot in scratched ferry window and made several frames. Unconsciously I selected a composition which wasn’t aimed to show Statue of Liberty but rather its glowing torch tiny from the distance. It boldly but helplessly tried to illuminate approaching darkness of night. There is always a hope.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, rather must recognize that is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Viktor Frankl

What is it that you want? That is a simple question. What do you want in your life? Everyone has an angel behind his or her back waiting for you to spell out the answer to this question. He would be glad to listen to you and make you wish true, but what is it? Can you put it into words, in one simple sentence - what is it that you want?

You may start thinking about world peace or bringing back health to your loved ones. No. That is the God’s job, angels do miracles but little ones and they do it only for you. In fact they are not that powerful, they cannot do miracles in a finger snap, they need your help. They can guide you along the path, they can save you from falling into abyss, but you are the one who has to walk this path.

I guess that where the word happiness comes in. We all want to be happy. And we are not that original in that desire. Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women want happiness. But what is happiness? We all want health, beauty, money, power and million other things because we expect that it will make us happy. But even those who beautiful, rich and powerful are often end up feeling that their lives have been wasted, that instead of being filled with happiness their years were spent in anxiety and boredom. The thing is that they have not walked the path, they received all these gifts without even wanting them. We don’t value things that are easy to get or given to us as a by fortune or random chance.

You cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. The truth is that walking the path makes us happy. The path to the goal we set to ourselves answering a simple question - what is it that you want? You have to have a goal before you find the path. You have to have a desire to reach this goal and follow the path. But here is the secret of all secrets - there is no a direct route to your goal. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it beautifully in the preface to his book “Man’s Search for Meaning“:

Don’t aim at success - the more you aim at it and make a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, for happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

… to be continued, hopefully

There is nothing new under the sun, not really. Technologies are new, yes, but the basic human condition has not changed for thousands of years. The same passions rule us that ruled early man. The same questions plague us that have plagued our ancestors from time immemorial. This is, and always has been, the source of great art. Who am I? Where is it? Why? (Or as the philosopher Alan Watts has proposed, there are only four great questions that have plagued man forever: 1) Who started it? 2) Where’s it going? 3) How will it end? 4) Who’s going to clean it up?)

It seems that photography presents us a unique choice in the field of art. We can work to find something new that has never been photographed before and claim it as our unique photographic turf. Or, we can accept the challenge to use our tools as merely tools and come to the realization that the real task of being a photographer is to develop ourselves as conduits for inspiration that creates artwork. One path leads to tomorrow’s cliche. The other path leads to artwork that seems to last. One eventually looks easy; the other looks forever profound.

Photography is unique when compared to so many of traditional art media because it is so wrapped up with this question. Photography is the most technological of all media. The technology of photography is seductive. It’s fun! But if we hope to make art without our tools, the issues that should command our attention most ardently are not the technological ones but rather the issues of wonderment, mystery and depth. We are not making suits of armor. Our tools will never dazzle with technical brilliance, at least not for long. The future generation will look back at our prints, our books, our techniques and our tools with the same quaint smile that we use when considering albumen prints and wet plates. They will never wonder how we did it. They will wonder how we could suffer such primitive techniques.

And this is where the life of the photographic artist begins. Our work will entertain them in its technological coarseness or cultural historicity, or it will engage them in the deeper questions of life. Our work will either show them our world, or ask them about theirs.

This is precisely why I love photography. It is a tool, but it is also a challenge that constantly forces me to think about what I am doing, what I am making and why.

Brooks Jensen
The Magic of It
LensWork No. 38

Once I had a chance to participate in online conversation with well-known Russian photographer Sergey Maximishin. The subject was on photographic composition. In short, Sergey’s point was that a good composition should have several visual attractors connected together in a closed loop forming some sort of polygon. Viewer’s attention moves from one visual attractor to another, but he is never forced away, outside the frame of the photograph. Moving in a closed loop visual perception works like a corkscrew following the spiral in deeper understanding and appreciation of the photograph.

In my photograph from Oia in Santorini I believe I constructed such a loop, a polygon: windmill, blue arch with a cross, following a rope from a bell you get to a blue vase, then cloth line with colorful red spreads swaying in a wind leads you to lower left corner from where your visual attention jumps back to the windmill. I think an integral part of this polygon is the rope from the bell to the blue vase. Otherwise horizontal lines formed by a structure of the building would have overpowered the composition.

On a personal note I don’t think that closed loop composition in a photograph works for me. I believe that we perceive pictures on a subconscious level in a split of second; the rest is just “an elaborate post-hoc rationalization” which we call consciousness. We think that we need time to understand the picture, go around it in a loop or a spiral when in fact we need time to rationalize our subconscious first impression of the picture. So, in my view my task as a photographer is produce photographs with “killer” compositions which are simple, powerful and bold. That kind of composition gives a “knockdown” to visual perception of a viewer. Later he may go in loops and spirals around my photograph but that is later, that is the next layer of visual perception. Ultimately a perfect photograph should be like a Newton’s apple which hits you in a head and which later could be slowly eaten satisfying your eyes with its round form and red and yellow color and your taste buds with its sweet zest. And hopefully that apple can open door for you to new ideas or powerful emotions.

I’ve learned over the years that usually the first thing that The Photo Gods show you is the cliche - that is, the most obvious photograph. I’ve learned that I usually have to take that picture in order to move on.

I think something that has not been widely talked about is that here is a great deal of self-doubt, and it is a part of the creative process. If you’re comfortable with what you are doing, you’ve been there before. We all fall back on things that are comfortable. It’s human tradition.

Jerry Uelsmann
A Conversation with Jerry Uelsmann
Interviewed by Brooks Jensen
LensWork No.17

Beauty conveys truth, but not the way we thought. Aesthetic significance does not deliver truth about human condition in general: it delivers truth about the condition of a particular human, the artist. The aesthetic features of art make sense mainly as displays of the artist’s skill and creativity, not as vehicles of transcendental enlightenment, religious inspiration, social commentary, psycho-analytic revelation, or political revolution. Plato and Hegel derogated art for failing to deliver the same sort of truth that they thought philosophy could produce. They misunderstood the point of art. It is unfair to expect a medium that evolved to display biological fitness to be well adapted for communicating abstract philosophical truths.

This fitness indicator theory helps us to understand why “art” is an honorific term that connotes superiority, exclusiveness, and high achievement. When mathematicians talk about the “art” of theorem-proving, they are recognizing that good theorems are often beautiful theorems, and beautiful theorems are often products of minds with high fitness. It is a claim for the social and sexual status of their favorite display medium. Likewise for the “arts” of warfare, chess, football, cooking, gardening, teaching, and sex itself. In each case, art implies that application of skill beyond the pragmatically necessary. Anyone who wishes to imply superiority in their particular line of work is apt to style themselves an artist. The imperatives of fitness display allow us to understand the passion with which people debate whether something is or is not art. A claim that one’s work is art is a claim for sexual and social status.

Geoffrey Miller
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

In a course of several years I had a privilege to attend to numerous ballroom dance competitions. I have been asked by dancers and organizers of these competitions to make some pictures for them which I gladly did. I learned how to cope with low light and mixed lighting, how to compose photographs with right dancers’ postures and how to anticipate the perfect moment in their movements on a dance floor before pressing a shutter release. This time I let myself to experiment a little bit with slow sync flash and long shutter speeds. I like the results. The photographs became quasi-paintings. Instead being frozen in their movements with short shutter speed dancers in these photographs do actually move. There is a sense of movement and flow in these photographs. And I like it.

Every time I come to ballroom dance competitions and see dancers in makeup and beautiful dresses on the ballroom floor, the way they dance, move and present themselves I cannot help but think about dance as mating ritual. It is a play in which a woman can be a woman, femininity at its extreme - beautiful, gorgeous, stunning with perfectly done hair, heavy salacious makeup, bright dazzling dresses. And they can dance. What could be better? You can do things on the dance floor which are impossible to do in regular routine life. In essence dance is a sensual drama played in public. And it is beautiful. It is art.