Details, Abstraction and long term projects
Having found a framework to describe the cyclical malaise and creative fury I've experienced for decades I want to try to break it down for you.
All the whimpering mute passions of this semi-apocalyptic dead-of-summer are closing, now. Night chills, light frosts curling tomato leaves, a litter of crab apples a fallen feast for that asshole squirrel.
shocks all.
every single year.
but if I’m going to get this post out I can’t linger in my pre-fall emotions.
The first year I can clearly remember the creative malaise of being past competent at photography was fall of 2011. A Feverish summer of falling in love with street photography come a never-stop-walking fall and I hit the wall. For some months I was wholly unable to see a photograph.
Looking back I see the street as trying to thwart what was coming and it worked. For a time. New cameras, new lenses, new places (for all you travel junkies) all work for a time. But time runs out and you find yourself back in the same spot looking at the world and wondering how you ever felt so in awe of it.
I’ve always thought hey, I’m a bit of a depressive maybe this is just how it is for me. Ebbs and flows, ups and downs. Darkness following light.
But maybe there’s more about our wiring and how we as animals must process information, at play, than we realize.
Having spent, now, over 20% of my life rolling down basically the same gravel roads, seeing the same structures, the same seasonal setups, the same wildlife, you might wonder how it is that at some point I haven’t quit, or relocated to a new place, or picked up a new focus.
I’ve wondered too and sometimes when deeply restless I’ve toyed with just quitting and being done with it.
This malaise had been growing season after season since 2020. Never fully letting me into the world I’ve always known as a photographer—which is seeing photos everywhere, all the time.
It seemed like after my mother passed and all the struggles leading up to it, somehow I broke.
As time passed, and regular markers which usually break up my cyclical malaise failed to have any impact—storm season, fall, hoarfrost and fog—I grew concerned I’d never see the magic again. 2020 passed. I made work but rarely if ever broke through. 2021 passed. 2022. winter of 2023 and into spring and while shooting regularly and making work I liked I still felt disconnected.
and then one day, I didn’t.
So what happened and why? and can we use this experience to help burn away malaise, perhaps on demand?
I think… maybe.
Let’s try to get a handle on what the malaise actually feels like. Maybe you’ll see some of it in yourself, or remember times you’ve experienced it. It’s not complex. In fact it’s so common as to be hard to catch when it’s happening.
You imagine going out to shoot and you think I’ll go to X spot and before you’ve completed that thought your mind fills with all the previous images you’ve made there. All the times you’ve seen it before and serves you up a general sense that you know everything there is to know about it. It’s worked out. Sorted. Filed. Done.
But, being a committed creative you soldier through this—btw, this very thing is part of depression too. When you project yourself into the future you cannot see a positive, or imagine wanting whatever is in that future—and you go to spot X, and lo’ what is before you is the farm you knew was there. The road you knew brought you there. That ditch, that shed. it’s all there. Bob’s farm. his cow’s.
And you see those Things, You see the shed. You see the ditch. The farmhouse as discrete things you’ve seen a million times before. When you project out in your head to where to go next you project blocks of land in every direction which you know, full of things you know. Houses. Roads. A nice donkey. but you can go over each part of it identifying the contents of the area and none of it, not a bit of it, in your mental map, excites you.
sound familiar?
It should because that’s how humans are able to function in a world of never ending complexity. We abstract away a billion details into concrete Things which makes them more manageable for our brain. We literally cannot function if we don’t do this.
Read this quote:
“There are then two ways for memory to destroy imagination: by retaining too many abstractions (thus failing to perceive fresh detail) and by retaining too many details (thus failing to perceive abstractions). The point is worth repeating because two beneficial categories of forgetting recur in these notebooks: in one, a mind has become too attached to its concepts or thought-habits and needs to drop them so as to attend again to detail; in the other, a surfeit of detail clogs the flow of thought and must be winnowed so as to see the larger shapes of concepts and abstraction" - Lewis Hyde1”
When I read the above quote years of trying to make sense of my own experience immediately clicked for me. The thing I’ve called the malaise is quite literally being unable to see the FRESH details of a particular thing in front of me, and seeing only abstractions built on experiences and memories.
bob’s farm, so to speak as bob’s farm. Not bob’s farm as it really is, ever changing, entropy and life fighting it out in real time.
The meat of life is in the details and so too is the beating heart of photography. One of the magical things photography can do is use specificity (details) to create a feeling of the general (abstractions) which get coated in nostaliga, or romance and turn bob’s farm into an idea about a type of life, or time of history.
But it always starts with the details, and each new picture starts with the fresh details.
For years I used light as my escape hatch from caring much about details. I shot light not things. I shot darks not places. if the light was good, the subject was good. Even with that escape hatch if you’ve ever suffered through a modern summer of smoke, or haze, or muted light. or a bleak grey winter. or a rainy non-descript spring or a fall which lasts all of two days you’ll know that we must also let the things matter or we will hardly shoot at all. Waiting around for good light, or the right light, will leave you sitting around holding your camera a lot more than using it.
So what brought me out of the malaise?
What brought the details back into focus, and pushed the abstractions, ideas and notion that I know all I need to know about this patch of prairie out of the way?
Painting. Bad Painting.
When, earlier this summer, I started learning to paint I found myself thrown into deep waters with no skills or soft landing spot and I found it both invigorating and terrifying. To thwart the terror I’ve approached it as a skillset like I approach all things you need competency in before you can begin to imprint your own vision on. Just doing the work. just painting a lot of bad paintings and trying to understand how light and color, which i know so well through a camera work on paper.
Which lead me to start looking for paintings around me rather than photos. Light setups, or scenes that might translate to the simplification of a basic painting well. A strong focal point, mixed with an idea of place.
Which if you were paying attention to the above quote is exactly the balance needed to open your imagination and curiosity up again. The right amount of details, the right amount of abstractions.
Within a couple weeks I began seeing photos everywhere again and despite the horrible hazy light of 2023 I began making pictures I cared about again.
Probably more significantly, I completely lost the sense I knew anything about what was around me anymore. I knew the roads, but I couldn’t know each patch of grass, or tangle of weeds, or flowering bush. I got back to not being able to make it more than a few kilometers from home when I went out because each few hundred feet was another entirely new, and detail laden, entirely unique thing I’ve never seen before.
When we dive too deeply into the details we get paralyzed by the scope of details in the world around us and stop making things. This I think, is why sometimes traveling somewhere new at first feels magical then can become overwhelming. Everything is new, everything is detail you don’t know and have to work through. Which excites the mind right up to when the mind can’t manage the amount of new information.
When we get too into the abstractions, we feel theres nothing new under the sun, and stop making. This is the standard I’ve been shooting my own close world for too long and now it all looks rote.
Can this be turned on and off at will? Maybe. I suspect the solution to going too far down the abstractions road is to force ones self to find a spot of at least some interest and sit with it a while. Trying to focus on each part of it in detail, observing. Making discoveries. I think the rest will follow naturally once the brain has a new job it’s tasked with.
It’s subtle but if your brain thinks the priority is small detail, not simplification your experience of a place can be very different.
It seems invariably we cycle through these phases and given enough time, if the world and circumstance don’t force you too deeply into one side or the other you’ll right yourself eventually but maybe understanding these two poles we bounce between creatively will help you stay out of the ditch in the future.
I hope to follow this up, possibly before the end of the month with a photo post. August was a good month. Two good storms, a huge roll cloud with the best light i’ve seen in 2 years, a dense summer fog (seen in today’s photos) and some time with my old friends the longhorns. I’d like to share those before we ramp up into the frenzy of fall.
A Primer for Forgetting - Getting past the past — Lewis Hyde
Excellent read! I am glad you found your way out of your block/struggles with photography! It can be challenging to find new photos in familiar places, but if you do it is such a great feeling. Your photos are amazing as always!
It's amazing how experimenting with an art form or medium new to us can do to the one art form we feel at home with. And it goes way beyond graphic arts! Join an acting group and you'll become a better guitar player. Take drawing classes and you'll incorporate new things to your dancing. It's almost like rewiring new paths in your brain.