The Art in Noticing

 

“I feel like you can’t care about something, something being the world, if you don’t notice it.”

- Keri Smith

I just love that feeling when things come together. When you start to notice the same theme repeating, similar ideas popping up over and over. It’s as if the universe is gently guiding your attention, if only you’ll stand still long enough to notice.

Lately the recurring theme seems to actually be the noticing itself.

I’ve always struggled with how to describe what I photograph when people ask; I don’t really feel like I fit neatly into any particular category. Sometimes I make images of plants or animals, but I’m not really a nature photographer. I do take pictures of the land, but I wouldn’t say that I’m a landscape photographer. Sometimes my pictures include people, but in my personal work I’m not really a portrait photographer, certainly not strictly. I occasionally skirt the lines of street photography and still life. The term “fine art photography” feels simultaneously too abstract and too stiff, yet I don’t feel like “vernacular photography” really fits either. I’m at some weird junction in between; the strange intersection - if such a thing exists - of all of these.

In talking with my friend Donna about it she suggested I use the answer she’s been giving people lately: I take pictures of what I notice.

So simple. And so true. Like when I noticed the way the sunlight created the most beautiful, crisp shadows of plant leaves on the table. And how the same sunlight allowed me to create a pensive self portrait on the wall. I noticed how in that shadowed self portrait I saw something of my mother. And how in a stack of old photos of her I saw so much of myself. I noticed how beautiful those images were to me scattered on the floor in the filtered sunlight, reminding me of a day alone in the woods, spring leaves scattered and overlapping above me, the sunlight filtering through.

Permission to Play

I recently discovered author Keri Smith and her series of books, journals, and apps all about creatively exploring the world. If you aren’t familiar with her I highly recommend just googling her name, as her website really doesn’t do her or her work justice. Ultimately everything she makes is about exploration, in every sense of the word. I’ve been playing on her apps, all designed to propel the user into simply doing just that: playing.

It’s occurred to me that for all of my creativity, I tend to prefer participating in art that is more structured. I feel most comfortable when I know the rules. In fact sometimes I think what I love most about photography is its limitations, and its structure. While I believe there is no right or wrong way to make art, including photos, my very innermost being feels like there is a way things should be done, and I tend to strive toward doing them that way. (If you’re familiar with the enneagram, I’m a pretty hard core One.) And I’m sure that serves me well in a lot of areas of my life. But when it comes to art and creativity I am very bad at simply sitting down with a random assortment of things or tools or even a pencil and creating something completely out of the blue, unstructured, or made up.

So for the last week I’ve tried to do more of what Keri encourages: give myself permission to play. I wrote a while back about making images for the simple joy of making, but I still have to remind myself to do it. Fortunately I spend most of my days with two very good reminders, if I just slow down and let them show me how.

Small Moments

The little stories of our lives tell of simple moments when the everyday is transformed into something remarkable… They concern the people that we love, the details that we observe… [they] encapsulate the reasons we get out of bed every morning: they describe the tiny pleasures and commonplace rituals that see us through every day.”

- Laura Pashby

Earlier this week I gave an online photography presentation to a school, and in preparing for it I spent some time going quite a ways back into my archives. As I sifted through images the ones I lingered over longest were usually those of small, everyday moments; lunch with my kids, time at the playground, images made during an afternoon coffee with a friend. I was taken aback by how empty my recent history was of these same types of photos. I used to practice on those images constantly. But as I’ve grown and changed as a photographer and a person, the types of images I make most have changed too. It probably hasn’t helped that, like many, my last two years have been lived feeling somewhat trapped inside one long everyday moment. Usually I find that you need to be able to gain some distance from something in order to really appreciate it.

But I enjoyed seeing the old images so much I decided I would try to do a better job of making more, even if just mostly for myself. The boys gave me a great opportunity when they spent nearly an entire day sitting side by side making valentines for each other. Truth be told I really sort of hate Valentines Day (Is there a Valentines equivalent of the Grinch? We’d probably get along quite well if there was…) But it’s hard not to soften a little bit watching these two put so much effort into making something they knew would make the other smile.