Photographyblog, David Warn, Creative Process

I wonder if any of you share this common scenario from my experiences as a landscape photographer? I find myself returning to full awareness, one knee sodden from immersion in a cold and muddy puddle, having crouched atop a hill in the wind and rain for an hour and a half making a single image. The hunger to make photographs has often taken over my mind for extended periods of time, inducing an almost trance-like state. The physical discomforts are irrelevant to me as I make an image; my mind is lost in a place where the physical no longer matters. In this dream space I’m unaware of the passage of clock-time, that mechanical manifestation of universal time, because I’ve become totally immersed in subjective-time. This is a plastic realm where seconds can stretch into hours and, conversely, hours can be compressed into an invisibly small interval. The question arises, just where does my mind go to when I’m making a photograph?

Simply put, when I enter a reverie whilst making an image my mind goes to a place where I can access my creativity. Sometimes I enter an almost meditative state, but this altered state of consciousness is not a mystical condition. It is a state that we are all capable of through application and concentration. By concentration I do not mean the kind of furrowed brow, pained expression that might have the caption ‘Thinking!’ appended to it but rather a calm exclusion of irrelevances, a state oddly more akin to peaceful daydreaming. It’s time to answer the related and crucial question of where does creativity come from?

The capacity for creative thought and to subsequently act upon on it is inherent in all of us, though often neglected or suppressed. The mystique that surrounds the notion of an “Artist” in Western society is undoubtedly partly to blame. Creativity has traditionally been seen as the domain of gifted, intuitive, often eccentric individuals with turbulent lives – Vincent Van Gogh is perhaps the archetypal artist. These individuals are mythologised and set apart from ordinary folk, after all, it does the sale price of their work no harm for them to be considered demigods. Whilst it is true that some artists fit this other worldly stereotype the majority do not. Psychologists have long characterised these kinds of behaviour as originating in the right hemisphere of our brains. The two hemispheres are thought to be responsible for opposing forms of perception and behaviour:

Left Brain	Right Brain
Analytical	Synthesizing
Logical	Random
Rational	Holistic
Sequential	Intuitive
Objective	Subjective
Concerned with detail	Concerned with wholes

It will be obvious from a quick glance down this list that the traits we associate with creativity are all right-brain and that the traits thought necessary for operating a camera are left-brain. It doesn’t however help us very much to say where they might originate since we seem to lack a convenient switch to turn on the appropriate behaviours. But there are ways for all of us to harness our creative forces; psychology has ridden to the rescue with an analysis of the creative process into four stages; preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Let’s take them in turn.

The preparation stage is when we identify a problem (something to photograph) and collect ideas about how we might solve that problem. These problems require a divergent rather than convergent approach. Convergent thought processes are used to solve problems that have single solutions, like mathematical formulae, where we home in on the solution. In contrast, divergent thought is needed to find a solution to a problem that has many possible solutions - whenever we make a photograph there are a host of alternative ways of photographing the same subject. We need to come up with as many different ways of solving the problem as we possibly can in order to guarantee an original solution. Typically for landscape photographers this stage would be spent in the field, though not necessarily so as we may already have thought of a subject but be struggling with how to tackle it. At the preparation stage we need to be fluent and flexible in our generation of ideas and resist the temptation for closure – to keep our fingers off the shutter release as long as possible. Artists from different media have described this frame of mind as a strange mixture of insight and naiveté – a need always to look at our surroundings, no matter how familiar they may be, as if for the first time. The British photographer Bill Brandt said that, "Most of us look at a thing and believe we have seen it, yet what we see is often only what our prejudices tell us to expect to see, or what our past experience tells us should be seen, or what our desire wants to see. Very rarely are we able to free our minds of thoughts and emotions, and just see for the simple pleasure of seeing. And so long as we fail to do this, so long will the essence of things be hidden from us”. And Vincent Van Gogh wrote that, 'A feeling for things in themselves is much more important than a sense of the pictorial.'

How might we achieve this state of mind? Firstly we need to be receptive and open to possibilities but this alone is not enough. We need to shut out the everyday babble of thoughts unrelated to the task at hand; we need, in short, to concentrate - almost to meditate. When I’m lost in picture making I’m often unaware of physical discomforts, my mind is focused only on making the image; irrelevances like wet clothing or cuts or utility bills or when I’m next going to eat are banished from my mind. As I wrote n my last blog, it is vital not to deny ourselves opportunities by blindly following a plan to make a predetermined image and remember that whilst experience teaches us what does not work it doesn’t teach us what will work until we’ve tried it. This requires us to have confidence in our own abilities, something we gain through practice and experimentation. Every time we press the shutter we need to make a leap of faith as well as a leap of the imagination.

The next stage in the creative process is incubation. When problems arise in our everyday lives we often follow the age-old advice of ‘putting it on the backburner’ for a while or even ‘sleeping on it’ until the solution occurs to us. This is a way of letting our subconscious work at a synthesis of the different elements of the problem and so arrive at a conclusion. We’ve probably all had the experience of going out to make images but being unable to find any satisfactory compositions, yet we might return to the same location in similar light and see pictures all around us. In the intervening time we will have incubated ideas about how to approach the subject from our original visit. This is why we often find it difficult to make images in a new environment; we have to spend time assimilating many different complex factors and ideas before we are ready to progress to making images. If you are stuck for a solution leave the problem to stew rather than worrying at it like a terrier with a bone. When you return to it ideas will flow more freely.

The third stage is illumination. This is the sudden realisation of a solution to the problem, how to make the photograph in our case. History is littered with anecdotes about such moments from other arenas of creative thought; from Archimedes jumping out of his bath and crying ‘Eureka!’; to the moment when Isaac Newton watched an apple fall and understood the notion of gravity; to Darwin extrapolating the theory of evolution from his study of finches in the Galapagos Islands. It is this seemingly unexpected insight that bolsters the myth of a kind of divine genius granted to only a few individuals. But this is just part of a process; neither Archimedes nor Newton nor Darwin arrived at their particular moment of insight out of the blue. They all worked on the problems for a considerable length of time, from months to decades. In fact in the case of the last two revelations there is strong evidence to suggest that these particular moments are retrospectively applied myths which never actually happened. We all have little eureka moments every day; we use this process when doing mundane tasks like trying to remember somebody’s name or solve a crossword. “Aha!” we say to ourselves, often not realising that we have emulated such august individuals in deed, if not in scale. It is critical that we delay closure in the first stage if we are to reach a new or deep insight. The smaller formats in photography sometimes seem to encourage premature closure. It is easy with 35mm to ‘snap away’ rather than stand back and analyse how to tackle a particular subject, though this matters little if the photographer persists with a subject rather than making an image or two and then walking away. Persistence can equate to the preparation and incubation stages, like a painters working sketches it becomes part of the problem solving process. Working, as Adams’ and Weston did, on large format forces the photographer to slow down. The physical processes for setting up the camera are a little cumbersome but the ensuing ritual allows time to analyze the problem, to look at many different solutions and provides an opportunity for incubation before illumination. Indeed the slowness and cost of film positively discourage premature closure.

The final stage is verification – reality testing our solution by implementing it and making an image. Obviously the solutions won’t all be masterpieces but the longer we can delay closure the better the chance. If a particular photograph, a verification, fails to meet our criteria then we must simply start again from square one. One great advantage of digital photography is that the verification is instantly available for the photographer to assess without the traditionalists agonized waiting for hours or days. The images that accompany this article were all made on a single afternoon in Death Valley, California. They were all made on a compact camera apart from the final image of the rear window of a wrecked car which was taken on Velvia on a 5X4 camera. The series represents the development process that I have described here leading to my particular answer to the divergent problem that these subjects posed. As can be seen, I made many images that offer solutions to this particular compositional conundrum. But the final 5x4 image is the one I feel best answers the question posed by the subject. On a different day, in different conditions I may well have reached a different solution.

The hardest part of the process is the delaying of closure because evolution has programmed us to quickly seek the simplest solution to perceptual problems. The overriding visual assumption we make when we look around us is that our environment is not inherently deceptive. To get past this we have to trick ourselves in to seeing things in a literally ‘new light’. One way of doing this is simply to study your subject for a long time until it no longer seems familiar, so that new relationships and patterns arise in the subject (try staring at any word for long enough and you will see that it suddenly becomes disconnected from its meaning, the ordering of the letters becomes strange and unfamiliar). The photographer Duane Michaels declared that, "I do not believe in the visible. I do not believe in the ultimate reality of automobiles or elevators or the other transient phenomena that constitute the things of our lives... Most photographers believe and accept what their eyes tell them, and the eyes know nothing. The problem is to stop believing what we all believe." Our perception is programmed to look for patterns and to switch off when a plausible solution has been found. For photographers to see something afresh and for this to excite the viewer, the trick is to go beyond the obvious and to embrace the ambiguous. Look hard, think long and only then press the shutter release.

The obvious conclusion to be reached from analyzing the creative process is that there is no single correct approach to making an outstanding photograph. In fact by definition an outstanding image will have arrived at a unique and personal solution to the divergent problem that the subject had posed the photographer. For this reason Edward Weston wrote that “…to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Such rules and laws are deduced from the accomplished fact; they are the products of reflection”.

Biography

http://www.lightandland.co.uk
http://www.into-the-light.com

David Ward is one of Britain's most accomplished large format photographers. He has a very varied knowledge of photography, acquired while working for previous advertising, design and publishing clients. Over the years David has photographed everything from dogs to food to racing cars but landscape photography has always remained his passion.

In recent years he has concentrated his efforts on leading photography workshops for photo tour company Light & Land, taking groups to places as diverse as Utah and Norway. His emphasis in teaching is on the photographer's vision, rather than on what equipment is being used, and he passes on his knowledge in a uniquely humorous and accessible manner. Light & Land runs a broad range of photographic workshops for all levels of photographers – both in the UK and worldwide – full details can be found at http://www.lightandland.co.uk

David has recently hosted Landscape Beyond - a hugely successful exhibition of his work at Londons OXO Tower gallery which was also the launch pad for Davids most recent book of the same title.

All images in this article © David Ward