The Artistic Process: On Being in the Zone

Street photography can get addictive.

Sometimes it’s the challenge, because you’re setting yourself up to be unobtrusive.

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My cameras are all very small. My Minolta AF C and Olympus XA 2 look like plastic toys so people don’t take me seriously even when they spot me.

Sometimes you want to be spotted. It adds drama to the scene.

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Sometimes you’re right in their faces but they can’t be bothered … this man saw me with my camera pointing at him and went on doing what he was doing…

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I get out and walk and get “in the zone”. It’s a subjective (but common enough) experience.

For me, it happens when I’m writing or reading or when I’m teaching, when I’m fully immersed in the experience without any sense of self-consciousness.

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, one of my favourite essays on writing poetry, T. S. Eliot wrote (among other things) on the artistic process:

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

And he goes on to say:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Writing, reading, teaching, and street photography are ways of getting myself outside of myself. It’s a way to silence that inner voice at the back of my head so that I’m not second guessing and talking to myself all the time.

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Anyone who wants to be good at what he or she does (especially though not necessarily in the field of the arts) ought to read Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.

He uses the word “flow” to describe that happy state of being engaged in endeavours such as artistic creation, athletics, scientific tinkering, and so on, to map out relationships between learning, enjoyment and satisfaction.

It’s rather “pop psychology”-ish, but it’s very enabling in terms of helping me think about art creation in a wholesome way, in a way that is opposite to that image of the tortured artist celebrated by the media. Van Gogh, Diane Arbus and Sylvia Plath – the list goes on.

But surely there’s also room for artists/writers who want to be productive and remain sane… there’s Henri Cartier-Bresson, who deliberately moved away from photography to take up painting later in his life, there’s Wallace Stevens, poet and vice-president of an insurance company, who was productive as a poet all the way till his death in his seventies.

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I get out of myself and look at other people and think about what it is that occupies them…

This man, for instance, stood just like this for a really long time, looking at a building across the road.

I took some time to frame the scene properly, and turned around later and saw there were bemused people looking at me looking at him…

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Everywhere we go, we bring along a baggage of impulses, desires, anxieties, ambitions…

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Maybe one day I’ll get caught and someone would tell me to grow up and that this is not a proper use of my time…

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The Camera as Sketchbook

I’m prepping for a talk on my manuscript in progress which features street photography and poetry.

In some ways, the camera has become my sketchbook.

Here’s Henri Cartier-Bresson from The Mind’s Eye (and the first part of the book is titled “The Camera as Sketchbook”):

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to “give a meaning” to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. (The Mind’s Eye pg. 15)

For the street photographer, the camera is a tool for thinking …

Here are some of the photographs I’ll be talking about, the first of which has been featured in a previous entry.

They are each paired with a poem in the manuscript.

I’m only including fragments of the accompanying poems here.

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*

“how hong kong works, no one knows,
though everyone says mm goi, mm goi,
thank you, small favour, another name
for waiter, excuse me, help.”

*

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*

“one can only be a tourist
constantly taking pictures

posing and making sense”

*

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*

“i tell myself i am a camera
though i am a camera trying to be a man

because a camera captures everything
and is nothing in itself.”

*

What they have in common: they’re about looking at the act of looking. In a way, these are photographs of myself…

Thanks for reading.

MTR Moments

I suppose these are not the most technically accomplished of photographs.

Yet there are times when technicality takes a backseat – you could have a technically perfect photograph that is meaningless.

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Here, we’re reminded of how street photography is an art that requires a seat-of-the-pants attitude. Sometimes it’s about serendipity and stealth and being “in the zone”.

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There’s not much to say about the composition in the above photograph.

Perhaps I’m forgiving myself too much, yet the imperfection says something of the constraints of the art in the particular environment.

I simply can’t really walk around and compose my shots in a train cabin as it would attract too much attention.

In any case, the cabin was crowded. Most of these people were about 1-2 metres away from me.

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This person saw me without really registering what I was doing and turned away.

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This person was too engrossed in his reading to notice.

It’s amazing how we switch off when we’re commuting.

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Yet I find these moments, moments when we’re lost in our thoughts, the most poignant of all.

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I didn’t think the above would work at first. I was thinking to myself at that moment that this was a wasted exposure.

I’m biased, of course, but now I think I’d rather like the artlessness of the composition.

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Again, not perfect. It’s not sharp enough.

At times like this, I take comfort in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s statement that “people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing” (The Mind’s Eye, p. 38).

Thanks for coming by today.