Creativity Stops and Starts

So the funny thing about photography is that I spend a lot more time not using a camera than using one. It's a big transition from creating, sending, and following up on promotions to devising, setting up, and shooting personal work. I mean, doing the promotion stuff requires creativity, but it's "manage-ment creativity" not "artistic creativity". Sometimes I want to jump from one mindset to the other, and it's pretty jarring.

Last week, after taking care of a few loose ends with the shoes promo, I looked through my book of ideas, and found nothing funny, but I felt like doing something funny. Well, you know, funny like I do anyway. So I hunkered down and did some brainstorming and...nothing. Huh. I reached down, poked around, dug in, pushed a little harder, strained a bit more, grabbed my creativity by the neck and shook it.

Nothing.

It's easy, in a moment like that, to worry that it's broken, since the fear that your last big idea was your last big idea is pretty common.

But I was approaching my creative activities the way I'd had to approach my self-promotion activities, and they don't work the same way. Self-promotion is about order, discipline, polish, and being bombproof, whereas creativity is about emergence, perception, formation, and vulnerability.

So I relaxed. Kind of looked sideways at my creativity instead, let it come, listened. And shortly the first little idea appeared, and soon grew into a flood of material.

As a friend said, "Gotta let the wind whip the crinkles out of your freak flag".

Ingenuity

One of the attributes that's necessary for both photographers and assistants is ingenuity. Around this time last year, I helped out Adam Moore from Sugar Digital on a shoot he was doing for Whale Wars. The banner on Whale Wars Facebook page is the result. You may have noticed a little photoshop's been done on that image.

Those crewmembers you see are actual crewmembers, and they were actually in the studio for the shoot, and they are actually really cool*. But what they weren't, actually, was piloting a Zodiac boat around the studio. It needed to be faked.

I know from experience that the closer you can get a subject to doing what they're supposed to be faking, the better it's going to look. And I know that standing on a wood floor on the third story of a photostudio and holding your hands out like they're gripping a wheel is not very close at all.

So, after we set up the lighting, and the subjects were dressed and ready, I suggested that we build them a boat, and everybody looked at me like I'm crazy.

I took a furniture pad, rolled it pretty tight, and stabilized it with gaffers tape, and put that on the mark. I placed a spare magliner shelf on top of that, et voilà, a rolling deck. I had ridden my bicycle, so I pulled off my front wheel, and rigged it on a C Stand arm in front of the new deck, et voici, a steering wheel.

The first subject hopped up on the deck, gripped the wheel, and started hollering. My little boat worked really well, and helped bring a little bit of authenticity to the poses.

You can see it at the Whale Wars Album on Facebook.

*I think there's something about death-defying activities that makes people end up cool; or maybe cool people do death-defying things. Chicken. Egg.

Wells Fargo Bank Archive

I recently shot a job for Wells Fargo Bank Historical Services. They're publishing a book to document their incredible archive of historical artifacts from the last 200 years or so. It was rapid-fire photography all day for five days, but the Wells Fargo people and my crew (well, Emily Polar) were really great, and we had a lot of fun. I managed to geek out on objects as much as their archivists did. Here's a selection of the 90 plus objects we photographed:

Back before there was a consistent national currency.

Emperor Norton money. I love Emperor Norton. That San Francisco not only accepted Norton, but let him print his own currency makes it my kind of town.

The original Articles of Incorporation for Wells Fargo, signed by Henry Wells and William Fargo.

After I shot this coin, I kind of wanted to redo it, so I asked if we could leave it in the library (we were shooting in the library in their building) overnight. They said "No." and returned it to the vault. Later I found out it's worth two million dollars.

I love this thing. It's a Fire Grenade. It's loaded with chemicals, and you were to keep a set of them outside your house. If it caught fire, you'd toss these inside and they'd hopefully starve out the flames. I wished I'd had an hour with this piece, instead of 20 minutes.

This. This is hard to describe, but that's uh, San Francisco. Apparently back then it was a hollow hill, with a beach. I think that might be a jet-black whale on the right. Somehow, this painting managed to creep into the future and inform that whole late 90's Mission School thing.

The archive contains a number of mascot costumes, from much more recent times. The shoes and gloves, that is. The shirt is mine.

Lest You Think These Spring Fully Formed as Athena

02:38pm

02:41pm

02:45pm

03:07pm

03:13pm

04:15pm

06:30pm

Of Packing Materials and the Environment

Sexed Up Bubblewrap

I met with a rep some time ago, and she suggested that while my lighting is beautiful, my subject matter is a little challenging, and that she thought that more mundane content would be more accessible. So I've collected a bunch of packing materials - boxes, padding, tissue paper...bubble wrap.

I'm looking for the story here in this stuff, and all that's come to mind so far is something about waste, about overpackaging. I headed in a couple directions during yesterday's test, and some of them explored that idea, so I'll be getting back to that.

But the bubble wrap photo really demonstrates the tension in my art right now, between cautionary tales and glamorized objects. If the message of the photo is that we use too much packing material, how does sexed up bubble wrap convey that? More appropriately, what is the message of sexed up bubble wrap?

If I want to suggest, and I'm not sure that I do, because I'm not even sure it's an issue any more, that we use too much packing material, is this the way to go about it?

And more broadly, I think the essence af the advice from the rep was to make pictures that people can and want to relate to. And few people want to be preached at.

Well, whatever. It's very early in the project and these things tend to work themselves out. I'll be fine with the sexiest collection of packing materials ever; I'll be fine with a sermon on the evil of packing materials. And maybe that'll be one set of photos.