Tag / Photography

by CameraTheoretica

Time And Creativity

Is age creativity’s biggest enemy? I have often wondered about this, but it was not until I read a recent article highlighting the brutal fact that most of the world’s greatest creative minds were in their 20’s and 30’s, that my self-doubt went through the roof. For those of us who have flown past those golden years too long ago, such pronouncements hit home with the subtle finesse of a baseball bat. Are we older folks doomed to creative oblivion? Perhaps longevity is not as much of a virtue as we thought it was, but be that as it may, we the forgone should not take this creative excommunication without a fight. We must do so even when accepting the fact that even the best of wines have their peaks and their valleys. In that unpredictable fluctuation between glory and decay, there is no arguing that some of these wines whose lives have been spent in dark, dusty cellars, do show glorious development with time. Who would have known, longevity challenging youth after all.

However, this is not to say that time, that most endangered depleted resource in the world, has been rendered irrelevant. Not by a long shot. In fact, time is always a factor, but perhaps in a more complex way than what the creativity doomsayers would have us believe. Time, in all its hurried glory, is both oasis and desert. Youth enjoys it in abundance, but at the expense of experience; age starves you of it, while overfeeding you with experience. Both realities fertile grounds for blooming creativity, provided one has not given up on the process. And while we could conclude that creativity, in its most absolute form, may not be age dependent, we may have to concede that the willingness to create, that complex blend of passion, opportunity, and industry, may have something to do with age. The passage of time may never diminish our ability to imagine, but it does take its toll on our ability to realize.

So, what must we do to dispel that notion that creativity only belongs to the young? The answer (or at least part of it) may lie in our ability to divest ourselves of distractions, or of what some pundits have dubbed “friction” impeding the creative process. Voices telling us that we are past our prime. Friction. Listening to people’s judgments. Friction. Thinking that we are incapable of doing something. Friction. Expecting recognition. Friction. Talking ourselves out of new ventures. Friction. And above all, not believing in ourselves. Major friction. All of these diversions, and many others, are the weight that keeps holding us back. They weight all of us down with the insensitive cruelty of a maritime storm. Time, while rewarding us with experience, also fills our plate with the accumulated aftereffects of past passions and responsibilities. It certainly doesn’t make matters any easier.

But the wisdom that comes with time may prove to be the great antidote with which to treat the statistical diminution of our creative lives. That wisdom is the key to distinguishing between the important and the superfluous in our daily lives. More than that, it gives us a compass by which to better navigate between the futile and the possible. Like the steering of a major cruise ship, experience tells us at what point to begin to turn the wheel to avoid being too late to be able to dock successfully downstream. Wait too long and failure is inevitable. Start too early and achieve the same results. Such is the case of the creative life. At some point in everyone’s life, it is too late to achieve some things, but sufficiently early enough to achieve others. With some hope, it is the wisdom of the years that will help us realize where that invisible line of demarcation lie between these two time-consuming, warring foes. By all measures, it is a gut-wrenching decision, so choosing wisely on where to apply the famous “Curly’s Law” from the movie City Slickers will make all the difference.

by CameraTheoretica

Hidden Stories

They are everywhere. Hidden, ignored stories that pass us by just as fast as the hours of our lives. What’s amazing is how easy it is to ignore them, or plainly, not see them. They hide in plain sight behind counters at the deli, behind the brisk steps of someone in a hurry, or by the side of the street as rubbish. All of them as important as our own, but just as ignored. Perhaps the result of a world in constant motion that has little time for the individual. We are all passing by, in a sense, deprived of the time and patience that these stories demand if they are ever going to be told. And while this observation is more descriptive than judgmental of the lives we live, it nevertheless identifies a gap in our modern way of living. We look, but we don’t see; we care, but we ignore it. Se la vie, I’m told, but I keep having a problem accepting the neglect.

Arguably, photography can play a role in filling that gap, but to a point. As much as we would like to describe photography as story-telling, the inherent limitations of those frozen moments sometimes make for better portals than history. Rarely do photos tell you about the events that led to that frozen millisecond, or what came after. In some respect, that’s understandable in a world in constant fluidity. Whatever the case, the before and after create vacuums of their own which only our imagination can fill in most circumstances. An object on the street was placed there by someone, but what sort of person would do that? A woman stares at a man descending an escalator, but what must she be thinking? On and on those visual gaps demand to be filled, and on and on we oblige with our imaginations.

That is why we, and I do mean all of us, are proverbial story tellers. We never stop filling in the blanks, faithfully accompanied by our imaginations. We are tireless messengers of life’s narratives, choreographers of the most intricate amalgamations of fact and fiction. Those intractable unknowns lurking in those vacuums leave us no choice. And say what you may, this unconscious byproduct of our less-than-perfect humanity makes for some wonderful stories.

So go on and tell us a story. Add the drama, or the reasons why, make it rain if you have to, tell us about love, about sorrow, and all the facts and feelings in between. What color was it? It doesn’t matter. What did she mean, where did he go? How long was a long time ago? Tell us what moved you, about regrets and tears, about joy and happiness, for we want to know it all. But whatever you do, don’t ever hold back from telling us a story, for we want to hear it. No, more than that, we need to hear it, for in its absence, we will only discover that we have lost all our humanity. And that would be the worst story of them all.