How do we discover the world outside of ourselves? How do we make this outer reality known to us and have a reasonable assurance that others share the same outer world we think is there? The environment we are raised in dictates alot of our inner behavior toward this shared reality we inhabit. We are bottle fed patterns of behavior; a smile is pleasant, a raised voice scares us and hooks us to a bad feeling, we learn to hold our parents hand for safety. We accept this physical world as fact not fiction. As we gain more knowledge and experience, we begin to shift our perceptions more inward and toward our reactions to things outside of ourselves.
These inner reactions relate to an outside force that is stagnating our creativity. We begin the long journey of self discovery and how we can imprint on the outside world our perceptions, our feelings and how this can change others behavior toward us, ultimately how we can connect with others through our own experiences manifested through art..
Through time, we become quick to size up situations and we gain intuition to skip alot of once necessary clues in order to make judgements, which could mean the difference between life and death or just a bruised heart.
In everyday life, this can be a good thing, but I don't think it is necessarily good when you are creating imagery with meaning. The mechanical aspects of photography are getting easier by the day, but the the intent in your subject selection and your final image is still complicated, frustrating, and necessary. We must think before we press the shutter.
What drives you to photograph? If you allow your negative patterns (conditioned responses to outer stimulus) to inhibit your ability to react, if you internalize this negativity, you could look at a scene and think it could be better and then move on. What you have accomplished is to ignore the present subject and miss an opportunity to make something from it. Obviously, their are times you just don't feel it and have lost interest and are tired of the struggle to create, but other times by pushing yourself just alittle more, trusting your intuition, you can discover a deeper reaction to your subject that was really there, but remained hidden until you pushed through your own inner barriers.
We have all felt the evil eye of negative comments about us, our appearance, our friends we keep, choices we make. The same is true when you show someone an image you created. This image says something about you whether you realize it or not. A negative comment can sting and create future barriers to your creative will. You must fight through the negative and grow from each personal image you take and begin to understand why you have become attracted to certain subject matter and not others. By exploring your inner world, you will find that once you overcome your trepidation to exhibit your work you can get to a better place of confidence. With positive feedback from trusted voices, we grow in our ability to act and not over think each programed feeling toward the outer world. We have all taken a picture of something that we felt was a great subject and had great meaning to us as we viewed it through the view finder. But, when we see the final image, we look at it again and wonder, "what was I thinking?". The subject is too vague and too cerebral to have any purpose. But so what? By making that exposure you felt something. You moved outside your restrictions and were able to find some kind of purpose for taking that image. That is a good thing, a first step toward image knowledge. The next subject will be looked at a little differently with more knowledge and experience.
The first image I remember shooting was a glove laying in the middle of a country road. The thing that drew me to this subject was its isolation and the feeling of abandonment that was present. I pulled off to the side of the road and went back to take the image. When I got close to the glove I noticed that the middle finger on the glove was raised, the glove was telling me to F... off. I smiled and knew photography was going to fun.
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