Shooting Wide Open

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I’m tired of photographer interviews. The thing I start missing when people talk about photography and especially many of the more documentary oriented projects that I’m attracted to is any discussion of their creative process in terms of affect. So I’ve been reading interviews with PJ Harvey, and in this one with Pitchfork, she says something about process and lulls in creativity that I find reassuring and true:

I’ve never thought of it as writers’ block, but I definitely have periods of greater or lesser activity. I think that’s pretty natural. The key is not to panic when you’re in one of the troughs of creativity. Because that’s so valuable, there’s so much learning to be done in that. In the moment, I feel like I’m in that space. It’s not resting, it’s almost like treading water and gathering information and trusting that it will come around again, and it will. I see it on a greater scale with projects, really. I think that’s completely natural. Sometimes you see artists burning very brightly, and they’ll have three or four projects in a row that are absolutely incredible. But I think it’s very hard for anyone to sustain that time after time after time. Some people do, but they burn out quite quickly. Or they die or something. [laughs] But in lots of artists that I admire, I see the peaks and troughs that [they] move through.

The first time that I felt bereft of any inspiration I may have panicked, but when you’ve been writing for 15 or 16 years, like I have, I trust in it now, I know that whatever it is that comes through me– this desire to make the work that I do, it’s there, it will be there no matter what. Even if I tried to beat it off with a shovel, it would still come back. I don’t worry at those times. I just know that it will be back.

It becomes something that I trust will be there, and all I have to do is let it be there. There’s no separation, really, between living and creativity. I don’t think there is. Sometimes people will say “Where do get your ideas from?” and it’s just life, it’s just breathing. The key is being open to that moment, and then there’s a wealth of inspiration.

In an interview with Laura Hird, what she says about dark music not necessarily being indicative of a dark personal attitude mirrors what she says in the PF interview about the work not necessarily reflecting on the creator’s personal life. For me that’s exactly what I want – some emotive impact without the bleeding heart exhibitionism. Much of art is translation of experience, sometimes alien or extreme experience, isn’t it? (I have David Lewis’ bat example on the brain for some reason – the problem of other bat minds?)

I really like that push and pull you get between the dark subject matter and the beautiful melodies that are flying around in there, which are quite uplifting, so I never feel particularly dragged down by the record. I always feel quite uplifted really, quite comforted.

One doesn’t have to be suffering to show suffering, you can orchestrate that. And I think in some ways when you’re not suffering yourself, you can present it in a much clearer way because you have that perspective, stepping back and looking at it. A lot of the people I find funniest to be around are people whose work can be very dark. It doesn’t mean that they’re dark people at all, it just means they have a certain sensitivity or a certain insight in being able to present that.

I read a wonderful quote by Leonard Cohen not long ago where he was talking about how sad songs mean so much to people because everybody suffers defeat in their lives in some way, whether it’s they didn’t get the job they wanted, or when you’re younger you imagine all these things about how your life’s going to turn out and ultimately that doesn’t happen to anybody, and so a sad song is incredibly touching because it connects us all to that sense of loss in some way.

I took a short 3D imaging workshop, and I’m keen on getting a stereo Holga. I’ve never been a fan of the Holga aesthetic but there’s something so sharp and delineated about most of my work that it’s frustratingly devoid of emotion in some way. I suppose lo-fi is an easy way out, but sometimes all you can hope for is a starting point.

I think particularly with instruments that I’m unfamiliar with, I can’t use my intellect to play that instrument because I don’t know how to apply it. And so it does all become about emotional response, and that’s often very naïve and child-like, and I use that to my advantage. I’ll often purposefully go to instruments that I don’t know anything about just to access that place.