For much of my life I used photography for its ability to realistically reproduce reality. That realistic image was valued as a family and personal touchstone that constellated memories and could be a center point for conversation.
Then everyone began to be able to take their own photographs, and I began to wonder what to do with myself and my photography.
I always loved being in nature, so chose to learn and practice fine art landscape photography.
After about 7-8 years, all my photographs looked like everyone else’s, because they were taking pictures of the same things. The thing that differentiated photographers was who could go to the most out of the way place first. That became quite an uninspiring path to follow since I had limited opportunities and resources. The opportunities for creating unique and personal photographic expression dwindled quickly. I struggled to know what to do, since I was stuck in the photographic paradigm of making realistic photography but wanted to express something personal.
The first shift in my thinking was that my camera was really just a tool and not THE reason to create a print. Next was to realize that the print was the work of art and the camera was one of several tools to get a work of art from this process. And lastly I had to see myself as an artist first and photographer second, since “photographers only produce realistic photographic prints”.
I came to understand also that all of the art in photography come in the processing. For me that meant altering my images in a personal way after I had recorded my images in nature. There was certainly art in the organization of elements in my compositions recorded by the camera, but that is more a technical consideration than an artistic one.
So I created photographic heresy and started changing the colors and forms in the image. The digital world provided seemingly unlimited possibilities for altering my images, and I began to slowly embrace them. First I started creating scenes with a painterly quality, then I progressed from realistic to semi-abstract to abstract prints. Over the subsequent years I began to radically alter the original images to suit my growing need for artistic expression. The last few year I have merged multiple images to create even more complex images to express more complex emotions and experiences.
Eventually the camera and software became simply tools in the process of creating my art, seemingly not much different than the brush, canvas, and paint for a painter.
What I now express is more art than realistic photography. I purposefully take the original realistic images from my photo sessions and make them into art that expresses my experiences in nature as well as in the world we live in more frequently.
I do not know where it will lead or what forms my art will take as the creative journey has no predefined path, except to use the tools at hand to create.
NEXT:What do I do? – the what of it all
