Stone by Stone

Whether in a gallery, a premium photobook, or an Instagram carousel, a collection of pictures needs to function as a unified whole as well as hold interest on a picture-to-picture basis. It’s a similar complementary relationship between the micro and the macro that makes the art of building dry stone walls interesting to me.

Through a process of careful selection, attuned to the specifics of each stone’s placement and the contours of the wider landscape, it’s possible to build walls that can endure for thousands of years. What’s more, their strength is the product of a keen eye and good taste, not mortar or fastenings. Even though my work would be lucky to survive for decades, let alone millennia, I do want to learn how to assemble projects with the level of coherence, structure, and purpose that this scale of longevity requires.

Architects and Gardeners

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up.

“The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if they planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.”

Street Portraits 1/100 — TJ

I love writing the newsletter to share what I’m thinking about and the media I’m enjoying, but I struggle to stay consistent when I’m busy shooting or editing. The point of greatest friction is trying to write and edit an essay for every issue. It’s hard to produce something inbox-worthy when my brain is elsewhere and my time is mostly spoken for.

I’d like to get an issue out the door every one to two weeks, so I’m going to remove the constraint of writing an essay for every issue. Instead, I’ll continue to send links to the best things I’ve read, listened to or watched recently, as well as pictures and perhaps a few lines on an idea or concept related to creative practice or attention that I’ve been mulling over.

Minimum Viable Everything

AA017 — Advice to a Young Photographer

I was asked recently what advice I would give to myself in my first year of photography — to sixteen-year-old Oliver. The more I thought about it, the longer the list became, so I thought that I would share it here in case it’s useful for anyone who’s trying to improve their photography. Rather than write it out as prose, I was inspired by Kevin Kelly’s posts — 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice and 99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice to present it in list form. Good advice is specific to your situation, so I wanted to make it easy to blast through everything, pull out what resonates, and ditch the rest. No single concept below applies to all photographers and all styles of photography all of the time. Instead, this is an idiosyncratic list of recommendations for the kind of photography that interests me — documentary and portrait photography, often people-related and shot at close to middle distances. As much as this is advice for the photographer I was twenty years ago, this is also the advice that I need to hear now. These aren’t internalised rules that guide my every move — they’re prompts to shape me into the photographer I aspire to be.

When Shooting

AA016 — Flat Earth Theory

Skilled photographers learn to see the world like a camera, not through a camera. 

To the camera, the content of a scene is devoid of meaning. The lens focusses light onto a two-dimensional light-sensitive surface, and the sensor or film emulsion records the location, amount, and colour of the light that hits it. You can't open up the aperture to let in more emotion, or use a fast shutter speed to freeze a mood. Merely pointing a camera at someone you love and tripping the shutter doesn’t guarantee that you’ll capture and convey your feelings about them in the picture that results. Unlike modern cars, cameras don't come with automatic transmission.

AA015 — Absence

In the few weeks before my Gran died, someone asked me to tell them stories about her life. I was stumped. She’d been a part of my world from the beginning, and I realised I knew virtually nothing about her.

My Gran had been a teacher, but I didn’t know what or who she taught. I knew she’d married my grandfather, a Navy engineer on nuclear submarines, and that he’d travelled a lot — she’d had to raise her kids by herself for long stretches. He died around when I was born, so for me she’d always lived alone.

AA014 — Creative Navigation

I’m plagued by doubts throughout the creative process, but they’re particularly pronounced when I’m in between projects. What should I make next? Will it be as good as the last thing? Has it been done before? Is it bad? (Oh God, it’s definitely bad.) Am I going to die poor and alone? Worse — am I going to die poor and alone and unknown?

I’ve learned to plough through the waves of creative uncertainty regardless. This isn’t an act of bravery, just an absence of better options. The waves keep coming whether I’m stationary or moving. When I’m taking a battering, it feels better to be making some progress, no matter how small, rather than hunkering down and weathering the storm. If I don’t persevere, when the tempest clears I’m back where I started or – worse still – blown wildly off course.

AA013 — DIY Learning

When I was seventeen, I walked out of school one morning and never went back. I walked down the long, tree-lined drive and out into a completely different life. As I walked, I slowed my pace and tried to focus on the experience — remember this, remember this — but I was so tired. I had spent the previous months in a fog; confused and unable to focus. The evening before, a doctor had diagnosed me with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and told me I should quit school, rest, and recuperate. When I walked into the Headmistress’s office, I couldn’t comprehend that not only was I ending my academic career, I had also annihilated the future I had taken for granted. From then on, I grew up out of time — no longer advancing in lockstep with my friends and peers, but making my own way, adrift on an ocean of possibilities. I felt both isolated and completely free.

After that day, I never took another academic class or sat another exam, but I never lost my love of learning. I suspect that some of my hunger for more information, skills, and experience was a misguided attempt to prove that I still had worth; that I wasn’t a failure. I still wonder how much of my self-definition as an autodidact is a defence against people viewing me as ignorant or uneducated. I was a voracious reader from a young age, but in my late teens and early twenties the reading was performative — books to impress before books to elevate. As I aged and became less reliant on external validation, my interests (rather than my personal PR department) began to direct my learning once again. Often, the time I spent learning about niche topics or refining useless skills didn't produce any tangible value. And yet the process made me appreciate what's possible given enough time and energy. In turn, this insight gave me a framework I could use to learn more practical skills when required.

Viewfinders

A camera’s viewfinder shapes the way you see and, in turn, the pictures you make. Beyond photography, your memories and identities create the viewfinder through which you experience your life. This viewfinder shapes the stories you weave and the memories you make.

The SLR viewfinder is seductive — your focal point is sharp and swims in a sea of blur. It’s all dreamy and beautiful. But if it makes everything looks great, how can you spot a good picture? Like a siren, it can tempt you onto the rocks of mediocrity. Likewise, one can’t help but be seduced by the play of light across the ground glass of a large format camera. You hide under a darkcloth, in the gloom of the confessional and try to make sense of a world that has been flipped upside down and back to front. Even amidst the clamour of a shoot, the peace and solitude is delicious; almost meditative. This disconnection from your subject gives you an emotional sobriety and attention to detail that is hard to find when you’re working a chaotic scene, camera in hand. However, if you faff too long in the dark, your pictures won’t show pictorial rigour, but rigor mortis.

Untitled, (Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973) by William Eggleston

The Ugly Stuff

William Eggleston returned from Paris feeling frustrated. He'd travelled there to follow in the footsteps of his idol, the French photographer Henri Cartier Bresson. Eggleston sought the emotion and humanity that Bresson had so decisively captured, but instead found a city so thoroughly documented by the master that it was impossible for him to see anything fresh.

Back in America, Eggleston lamented to a friend that he was at a loss for interesting subjects. Eggleston felt uninspired by their banal and ugly surroundings — there was nothing extraordinary for him to shoot. His friend stopped him and said, 'Shoot the ugly stuff'.

Musical Differences

I love to look at photographs, watch films, read books and listen to music. But while I take pictures, make films, and recently started to write for the first time since I left school, I feel like making music is off limits. I say that creativity is open to all and I think that anyone can learn to do anything better with practice (with certain headstarts conferred by innate ability or environment), so why don’t I apply that logic to music-making?

Let’s be specific about what I mean when I say that creativity and improvement are open to all. I don’t think someone can pick a discipline at random and ascend to its pinnacle with only hard work and good teaching. There are upper bounds imposed by life’s twin lotteries of genetics and life experience. If you’re 5’ tall, you’re unlikely to become the next LeBron no matter how much time you spend on the court. Likewise, if you begin to learn the cello at 50, you won’t be stealing work from Yo-Yo Ma any time soon. But that’s not what ‘open to all’ means — I’m talking about enjoying and improving at a skill for it’s own merit, not for plaudits or world-beating dominance. You don’t have to be the best at something to find it rewarding and it’s not too difficult to attain the level of competence most activities require for deep fulfilment. You can become more skilled than 99% of non-practitioners of an activity, like chess playing or language learning, with a modest investment of time and effort. And, if you increase your commitment, you can become better than the majority of keen amateurs with a program of consistent and intelligently designed high quality practice.

Lineage

When you want to create at the cutting edge, what use do you have for the dusty plaster casts, stodgy poems and clouded images of the past? On the other hand, if you decline to stand on the shoulders of giants, how will you see above the clouds to the clarity beyond? Ironically, the more individual my work has become, both in content and in style, the more clearly it fits within the lineage of practitioners that have influenced and shaped my way of seeing and responding to the world. Initially, I was trying everything on for size, like a child assembling outfits from a parent’s wardrobe, aping first this style, or that mannerism, playing at being a grown-up photographer. You could identify individual images as being derivative of a particular picture or photographer, but my approach was too scattershot for its roots to be divined clearly. Lacking roots, it lacked direction. As I paid equal attention to my practice and to the work of the photographers, artists, writers and filmmakers I admired, I assembled a constellation of mentors, alive and dead — stars I could navigate by.

Good Enough

I used to aim for ‘excellence’, but now I aim for ‘good enough’. This attitude would probably make my younger self wince. Fortunately, that puritan is consigned to the dustbin of history and doesn’t have a say in the matter. Back then, I was arrogant about my ability and snobbish about my peers, but I had very little to show for it in my life or work. The fields I sowed with my fanatical (and noisy) dedication to truth and beauty remained barren. So how does reduced ambition result in a higher yield come harvest-time now?

Devotion

For a long time I thought that love was a feeling that's beyond control — whose arrival is idiosyncratic and whose departure is as painful as it’s hard to explain. I thought that it was something that you waited for, a neurotic guest that you daren’t question too closely, lest you wake to find that they left before dawn. This has caused me problems in the past — I’d wait for love to arrive, thinking that it would deliver the energy and closeness that I craved, rather than taking action to create the conditions in which it could thrive. I’d examine my feelings in turn — this diffuse warmth, that amorphous fondness — to divine if the combination that I felt was the ‘love’ that people talk about. My understanding of love was focussed on an object that’s hard to detect and easy to project. I was never tumbled by a wave of emotion or pulled into a sea of passion, and so I found it hard to feel the certainty that I read about in books or heard from friends. I could squint and say to myself that I ‘feel some kind of way’ but in the long term, the deposition of my heart never withstood cross-examination by my head.

Family in the Frame

One of my favourite pictures is a black and white photograph by Emmet Gowin that shows two children, a boy and a girl, entwined in short grass. The boy straddles her, but is collapsed forwards so that they are chest to chest and ear to ear. He is topless, wearing only a pair of dark denim shorts. The curve of his neck traces the line of her jaw, while the fingers of her right hand rest lightly on the opposite side of his neck, the index finger on the back of his left ear, the little finger against his shoulder. She is wearing a white hairband and a few strands of dark hair have escaped across her forehead, stopping just short of her closed eyes. Blades of grass stick to his white back and limbs, and also to her thighs and calves. The dark and angular texture of the grass that surrounds them rhymes with his straw like hair, but contrasts with the soft, pale skin of their childish bodies.

I see an almost transcendent peace and abandonment in their repose; from her beatific expression, eyes closed, lips parted; to his surrender to gravity. However, it is the pull between tension and tranquility that elevates this image for me. Below the bliss, there is a sense that this scene is the result of something more dynamic, more aggressive. Their bodies suggest relaxation but also exhaustion, perhaps the result of a ferocious bout? Are they submerged in an embrace or are we looking at the victor pinning the vanquished? Her right hand lies so delicately against his skin, keeping him close; yet literally on the other hand, her left arm is pinned uncomfortably under his body, her left hand awkwardly trying to free itself at his hip. His left hand is balled into a fist, seemingly grasping the grass at her elbow; but is he pushing against the ground to lessen her discomfort at his weight, or is he pulling himself down, the better to hold her in place?

Emmet Gowin, Nancy and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970

In the Shadow of the Self-Image

Man is the creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture —Iris Murdoch

The Voice in my Head

When I was twelve or thirteen I would lay on my bed and try to silence the voice in my head. I tried to crush it with gritted teeth. I tried to ignore it — maybe I could freeze it out? Sometimes, I tried to do nothing at all. On occasion, a space of quiet and tranquility would open up, for a moment, perhaps two. I savoured these moments of peace, then:

Photography in the Machine Age

From its inception, photography was a marriage between human and machine. The lens and the light-tight box allowed us to capture the light we saw in the wild. First we made life easier by using a mechanical shutter to expose the sensitised plate to light; this meant we didn’t need to uncover and re-cover the lens ourselves. Later, we subordinated responsibility for focus and exposure to the machine, and later still, during the rise of digital imaging, we gave the camera the role of darkroom too. At what point is the human no longer necessary? When does the machine assume the role of eye and brain?

Windows

Attention is the beginning of devotion —Mary Oliver

Welcome to issue 001 of Art & Attention.

I'm starting this weekly newsletter to give an insight into the process behind my pictures, to learn in public and to share things that I think are interesting. It's ostensibly about the interaction between creative practice and the application of awareness, two foundational areas in my life, but it’s going to be much less boring than that sounds. I’ll include links to the books, articles, podcasts and music I’ve been enjoying over the past week, along with ideas I’m excited about, great work by other artists, and useful tools and techniques.