Looping open

As you know, I like to talk about pictures and picture-making. In class I probably get sidetracked, actually, and spend too much time on tangents. But the fact is that learning the tools and technology just isn't enough. Pictures matter to us as a culture and as individuals. And learning how to talk about pictures, how to share our ideas and intentions, is crucial to becoming more complete photographers and artists.

This week I asked you to mark the moment that something we've done in class makes a difference in the way you make pictures. It's an essential part of the learning process because it begins to close the feedback loop. For example, in class we talk about something—exposure, saturation, cropping, whatever—and tomorrow you bring that idea into your body by adjusting your f-stop or shifting your frame. Recognizing that you've done so solidifies the learning and integrates idea with practice, or, closes the loop, so to speak.

Late in the evening on Thursday, as I was cleaning up the lab, I ran into Michelle, a student who worked with me learning Photoshop a couple of years ago. After a very cool moment of saying hello again, she told me that my song and dance about keeping a camera with you was finally making sense to her. This is the way it works again and again. The hard work of learning this stuff often begins with simple recipes that sound both too easy and impossible. In Michele's case, I guess, the desire to learn photography was actually impeded by not making time to take pictures. When she suddenly realized how my ranting in class ("take your camera with you!") made a difference to her photographic method, new options began to appear in front of her. (Anyway, that's how I interpret her comments!)

Here's another way it works for me: looking at your work over time brings up ideas and consistencies that can be built upon. These photographs of my dad (above) and of my son Connor (below) are from a long continuity of pictures. But I'm not consciously working on an integrated project, here. Rather I see these as belonging to a desire to pay attention to my life. In retrospect I see ideas that matter to me, and the pictures begin to speak to each other, even though I took them years ago. Going forward, perhaps, a project begins to take shape; and current thoughts about memory, continuity, expectations, might start to inform future pictures. In a sense it's like another kind of feedback loop beginning to spiral open....