finding form

a content focused generation has us in bad form

Sometime back in 2010 I had run my photography aground.

maybe my life too. hard to say now.

it’s only 14 years, but thinking about what’s happened online in 14 years is staggering. we’ve ushered in the era of “content” in full, and with it all it’s trappings and problems.

non stop content consumption, and production is long tail poisoning. slowly eroding. slowly changing. death by a thousand reels rolling past our glazed over eyes. we all know this isn’t normal but we still play along and tolerate it.

in 2010 my photography life was much different. I shot about 20 nude model shoots a year. I took random photo trips. I went for long walks, but often went weeks or months without making any photos. Production was scattershot.

instagram fixed us though didn’t it? really really taught us how to always be producing?

I hit a wall in spring of 2010. Couldn’t see photos anymore. Couldn’t get roused to action by another nipple or winding wooded pathway and nearly quit. Spoiler: I didn’t. Instead I explored several genres of photography I hadn’t before and very quickly fell in love with street.

deeply, psychotically, in love. the kinda love you burn your whole life down for.

A torrid summer of work followed by the utter collapse of my back (and life) sent me out to the rolling alberta prairie to rehab/recover and find a new way. I kept shooting street for a few years but it was just too hard to get to the city regularly. The passion fades.

This isn’t really about that.

shoot street every day for many hours and you’ll quickly learn good “content” is elusive. Humans are mostly boring. Check wikipedia. You’ll be rewarded by the unexpected but the long hours between those rewards could can lead to dark thoughts. I found myself having those dark thoughts again mere months after falling for street at the same time a meme was going around about “boring life, boring photos” which sums up the instagram vibe nicely and hit me hard.

I fucking hated all of it and was a terrified of what happens next if street doesn’t keep me engaged. my life was decidedly boring. or, i felt like it was. Looking back now it was quite layered with people and relationships and interesting things.

still, non-boring lives are not handed out equally but beauty ought be. you might not be born with access to daddy’s yacht or grow up with the next big indie band but surely where you live the sun casts shadows. surely where you live there are man-made and natural structures altering the path of that light.

we call this form and what I learnt in that summer of street is it’s the stone we build our house upon so it can weather the malleability of our moods, cultural tastes, fads and fancies and sometimes speak to the non-language, non thought side of humanity in unexplored ways.

when we search for good content, or clever pictures (looking at you street photographers) or anything where the literal subject is information being passed we run the risk of reducing the visual world to just that. Information being passed. we can and will dress that up with story telling, and calls to hopefully universal emotion but it still boils down to transmitting ideas/information via photos.

you know, that sounds a lot like… marketing?

another great summation of instagram and everything that’s followed it.

form hits different.

And I will never use that phrase again. gross.

What then are we to do if not take pictures of our lunch (guilty) or of the space needle, a very cool windswept tree that defies logic (was jealous of this trend)? What does that leave?

The short answer is everything.

The long answer is everything.

shifting focus away from specific subjects and the information/ideas we have about them we find the world is just a collection of ever changing forms, colors, textures and literally every square inch of it is comprised of these things.

Including your lunch. your windswept tree. your spaced out needle.

Rather than shrinking the subject matter you’re growing it. That plate of broccoli (fuck yeah broccoli) is more than information. its a sea of shadows, highlights, tones, textures and damn if edward weston didn’t make like 200 large format prints of a pear. but he wasn’t, you know, snapping a pear for instagram. he was learning about pears. light. shadow. tone. texture and relating it back to the entire human experience.

which inevitably means a pear that looks like a woman’s ass. You can’t fault him for that. pears just do that.

And humans just do content. we do autopilot. we do the simplest work, with very sophisticated tools and then want rewarded for our efforts. myself included. we all want that instant feedback saying hey you’re amazing because why wouldn’t you.

but over time, this mindlessness, this simplistic approach will eat away the core of your motivations—looking at myself now, it ain’t pretty—for all the reasons listed above and many you already know about the toxic chase for likes, admiration and some reasonable modicum of self esteem in a world full of people hustling harder than you, more creative than you, with more access and time than you.

The focus on form resets all these inequalities. no one has more form available. okay, possibly Norwegians. those 24 hour sun days. endless forms.

I write this as I look over the gradual decline of my eye. Once very well trained in form, shape, tone and texture and now lazy and unable to sort through the noise of color and idea. They say making a bad color photo into black and white won’t make it a good photo but making an average black and white color often has the opposite effect. Color masks so much. Distracts from so much. You can get away with the shock and awe of deep reds. It will hide how bad your form is. or how absent. And if you have any form at all that pleases the eye slapping some color on it will surely make an acceptable photo.

All this in mind I’ve been very focused on my garden and making pictures of savoy cabbage, broccoli leaves, and the swoopy curve of flowering onion stem.

I can’t claim to have made many good pictures recently¹. I’ve made a couple. because making a truly good photo is more than just pointing a camera at something. so much of it is chance, but so much of it is care and attention to form and texture, which are skills that atrophy. You can’t just switch it on and off. You must develop them, then maintain them. So, I’m on this long term project now of repairing my eye. Of working those muscles. and only those muscles. The content can wait.

I’m seeking good Form.

I want a pipeline to that part of your brain that doesn’t speak in language. Doesn’t have ideas. doesn’t know a chair from a collection of lines but knows fundamentally and indisputably when a pleasing arrangement of forms come together and gives that feeling you can’t quite shake.

people often love photos but can’t explain what makes it work. That’s form.

we need to think about what the last 15 years of rapid and constant content has done to our brains. if we care about making things, we should care about the slow diminishment of our skills and craft and be ready to accept making a bunch of mediocre work in service of hopefully making a small amount of good work.

even if it all comes out looking like a woman’s ass.

1. The next email will be what I think are some of the better, but still not great work. Watch for that.