Bruce Barnbaum - The Art of Photography - An Approach to Personal Expression

What I’m suggesting here is to apply your lifelong interests to your photographic seeing, especially if those interests have a visual component. I had a lifelong interest in physics and saw its visual component in Antelope Canyon, though I was surely not an expert in physics. Certainly I was not in the class of Einstein or Feynman when I instantly related Antelope Canyon to force fields. I recommend you apply your own lifelong interests, knowledge, and expertise to photography whenever possible. You may not be able to preplan that, just as I couldn’t have preplanned applying insights in physics to a place like Antelope Canyon. You can’t know in advance exactly how the process will work, and that’s OK. I didn’t preplan my photograph of the birch forest in Glen Affric; I just did it when I saw it! Nor did Reed and I preplan our photographs of the Alabama Hills. Instead, we both just did it!

Follow your gut feelings about how you want to photograph and interpret subject matter. Too often photographers are so unsure of themselves that they’ll point to something and ask, “Is that Zone 4?” or, “Is that low on the histogram?” Of course nothing has a zone number on it or a selected location on the histogram. It’s whatever you want it to be! But the question shows both uncertainty and a desire to see the scene, photograph it, and print it in some standard, acceptable way—a “politically correct” way. That approach overrides intuition. It’s walking away from your own gut feelings, from your own real goals.

When Einstein developed the theory of relativity, he didn’t do reality checks with other physicists asking, “Does this make sense to you?” He plowed ahead. Feynman didn’t ask if his silly pictures made any sense to others as he refined his ideas that lead to QED. He plowed ahead. I didn’t ask if seeing Antelope Canyon as a force field made any sense to others. I plowed ahead. That’s a critical thing to recognize: you can’t force intuition . It happens when it happens. Before entering Antelope Canyon I couldn’t tell myself to go out and find Antelope Canyon so I could apply my lifelong interest in physics to it. But once I walked into it, the ideas from my physics background instantly tumbled into my head. I went with those thoughts.

There’s a lesson here. I didn’t second-guess my intuitive thoughts. I didn’t run away from them or try to suppress them. I didn’t say, “But this doesn’t tell you what Antelope Canyon looks like.” In fact, that didn’t matter to me. I was using the shapes of the canyon walls to express my thoughts about something completely different: forces in nature. That became my guiding principle in subsequent photography in all the slit canyons. I’ve never found such forms in any other subject matter I’ve encountered, restricting that intuition to those narrow clefts alone.

Too many people encounter something that sparks their intuition, but since they literally fear those thoughts, they actively suppress them. They want to be sure that they’re not doing something weird, bizarre, way out, or just downright silly. Well, any of those may be true. That’s the chance you have to take. But if it makes sense to you, I urge you to roll with the flow and do it!

Einstein and Feynman knew a huge amount of physics, so their intuitive notions made sense to them. Just as my interest in physics made my interpretation of the slit canyons sensible to me, you can draw on your interest and knowledge of things you’ve observed all your life for your best imagery. Use that understanding to lead your own vision.

Of course, as your knowledge and experience of photography grows, you have progressively more to draw upon to marshal your intuitive ideas through to the final image. For example, my knowledge of reducing contrast in a scene through compensating development (figure 9–16) gave me the technical tools to carry my vision through in Antelope Canyon. That technical knowledge was new to me at the time. But I needed no new photographic knowledge to see the birches in Glen Affric as I did, nor to see the boulders of the Alabama Hills as I did.

With increased photographic knowledge, you can be looser in your field work as well as your darkroom or computer work. You get so comfortable with it that you can give yourself the freedom of altering your usual methods when necessary to create a different result. In time, such decisions also become intuitive because you quickly recognize when standard methods will fail to yield the results you want.

No matter what your level of knowledge is, you can do a lot right now! You will be able to do more in the future as your knowledge grows, but you can still do a lot now. You can, and must, apply your intuition borne of your lifelong interests to do photography in your own unique manner. If you don’t, you’re shortchanging yourself and depriving the world of your photographic insights.

Conclusion

First, let’s see how these thoughts mesh with the ideas of previsualization expressed early in the book. I believe you should previsualize the final image to the greatest extent possible while you’re standing behind the camera, but also that you should give yourself the freedom to see it your way rather than anyone else’s way. The ideas expressed here explicitly ask you to follow your own vision and your own intuition, rather than worry about others seeing it your way (or you seeing it their way). They may see it your way. They may not. That’s their problem, not yours. Follow your instincts, your vision, and your intuition of how the scene should be photographed and interpreted. These thoughts reinforce the earlier ideas about previsualization.

The bottom line is this: Know yourself and your interests. This is more difficult than it sounds because we tend to misread ourselves. Too often we overrate or underrate ourselves, or just fail to understand our own interests properly. Beyond that, we tend to doubt our own intuition, our own vision. We’re afraid to rely on it or use it. We may even think it’s wrong to be intuitive. It isn’t. Don’t run away from your strongest intuitive notions: They’re likely to be valid. You’ve got to be bold enough to take the risk.

So, although you can’t force intuition, don’t deny it when it strikes. Once you get a handle on your own interests—and along with them, your areas of expertise—you can confidently apply your intuition and understandings far more effectively to all things photographic, from the initial seeing to the finished product, and also to the methods used along the way.

When all is done, try to take a step back and view your work as a dispassionate observer. Ask yourself if your work still communicates with you . Be prepared (and willing) to make some adjustments.

40-Mile Canyon is one of the many side canyons of the Escalante River in Southern Utah, itself a tributary of the Colorado River. Midway down the dry, wide canyon, the trail suddenly drops via several switchbacks into a narrow cleft with running water. A waterfall, seemingly coming out of nowhere, feeds the lower canyon. I named it Gothic Fall because of the pointed arches leading deep into the rock that holds the elegant stream, which runs down a slanted channel it carved over the millennia before dropping to the canyon floor .

Figure 17-4. Gothic Fall, 40-Mile Canyon

Chapter 18. Toward A Personal Philosophy

THIS CLOSING CHAPTER BRINGS THE BOOK FULL CIRCLE. We started by inquiring into ourselves—our own personal interests—and asking what we wanted to say about them and how we wanted to say it. Then we delved into the techniques and considerations that translate those desires into visual statements, and not mere “pictures”. Then we engaged in some philosophical thoughts about art and creativity. In this chapter I hope to suggest avenues for improving your vision in areas that already interest you, and for drawing inspiration and insight from areas you may have never previously considered.