I recently started reading a really fantastic book, The Meaning in the Making; The why and how behind our human need to create, by Sean Tucker. Sean is a wonderful photographer, as well as filmmaker. I’d been following his instagram for a while, always enjoying his images. Then my friend Donna mentioned having watched a couple of his videos that she thought I might enjoy, and told me about the book. But I didn’t think much of it until I watched the videos myself. The almost spiritual way in which he approaches creating drew me right in, and I purchased the book immediately.
There’s a lot I love about the book, and I suspect I will be writing about and referencing it for a while. Already it has had a profound affect on my outlook on my craft. What has resonated with me most deeply though are his thoughts on why humans create. In short (and believe me, he says it much better than I, so if this intrigues you at all I highly recommend you pick up a copy) he says that we humans have a basic sense - whether it be from a religious or scientific outlook - that the world ultimately is headed towards entropy, towards chaos, but that we also have an innate wonder at the order that we find in the world. He posits that when we create, we’re attempting to restore order:
“I think we collectively intuited, long before science gave us the language, which way the universe was bending, and every act of creation on our part is in defiance of Entropy. Every time we pick up a paintbrush and choose complimentary hues to apply to the canvas, or arrange elements through our camera viewfinders to create a pleasing composition, or press fingers into wet clay to wrestle form from a shapeless lump, we are bending things back toward Order and wrestling them from Chaos.”
Reading the book has had me in a contemplative state, considering why I create the images I do. Why do I feel compelled to photograph some things and not others? Why do I choose, often times, to turn my lens away from the obvious subject and instead make a picture of something that seems so odd or banal as to make no sense?
I’ve highlighted so much in the book already, including the passage above. But when I read it there was one particular phrase that jumped out at me: a pleasing composition. Sometimes I get so busy looking for a deeper meaning in my own making - striving to find purpose and worrying that my images aren’t saying enough - I forget that meaningful can sometimes be as simple as creating a pleasing composition; that there’s value enough in the simple recognition and creation of order.