Announcements:
- My new e-book, Future Hindsights, will be available for purchase from my website on Friday, May 15th. I will post an announcement and link on this blog when I release it. If you wish to receive the announcement and my regular blog articles via email, please subscribe here.
- If you wish to purchase autographed copies of my printed books, you may order them from my main website. Please note that at this time I don’t intend to renew my inventory. Once I run out of copies, you will still be able to purchase my books from Amazon and other sellers, but I will have no way to autograph them for you.
But there is more to the present than a series of snapshots. We are not merely sensitized film; we have feelings, a memory for information and an eidetic memory for the imagery of our own pasts.
Our layered consciousness is a tiered track for an unmatched assortment of concentrically wound reels. Each one plays out for all of life its dazzle and blur of translucent shadow-pictures; each one hums at every moment its own secret melody in its own unique key. We tune in and out. But moments are not lost.
—Annie Dillard
There are many ways to learn. We learn actively when we assimilate information or instructions, or by attempting new things and deriving lessons from our successes and failures. We learn passively from experiences and chance discoveries. Some things, however, we only learn by reflection—by revisiting our past experiences, recognizing in hindsight patterns and trends that emerge, take shape, and become noticeable over time. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “The years teach much which the days never know.”
Every so often, when prompted by nostalgia or when I feel in need of insight or direction, I go through a ritual I have come to refer to as “archive diving” (sometimes more humorously as “dumpster diving”). The ritual consists of settling down, making myself comfortable, choosing a playlist of powerful music, perhaps a good beverage, and reviewing my image catalog starting at a random point some years in the past and studying all the images I have made starting at that time—not just those I decided to finish or share.
I never set an endpoint for these “dives.” I have learned that they tend to become self-sustaining, rekindling dormant emotions and memories, often leading to introspection and “aha!” moments, almost always discovering things in my work that I did not consider previously or was not conscious of at the time, or have since forgotten. Sometimes, a memory, an image, or a theme, placed in context of later events and the person I have since become, also reveal evolutionary trends in my life and work, seeing how earlier experiences and trials have matured into later work, concepts, philosophies, and attitudes. I keep going until my mind feels saturated or until a jarring epiphany emerges and demands deeper, more focused contemplation.
I am especially prone to making these “dives” at significant junctures in life, when I feel like I’m lacking a clear direction, or when I’m looking for a next step or a nudge down some formerly chosen path. Sometimes, when life bears down, a “dive” also helps me disconnect for a time from the challenges of the day to reexperience and reconnect with meaningful times, places, companions (human and other) and feelings—to remind myself of the bigger picture of my life, the ups and downs, the great journey I have traveled to arrive at this point in time, if for no other reason than to reassure myself that so many things I now know and have become were far beyond my capacity to predict, that I have not stagnated in, or worse—wasted—former years.
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A common topic of discussion and contemplation among photographers, especially after accomplishing a sufficient degree of technical competence and seeking to progress creatively, is the question: Why do you photograph? I hold this to be one of the most important questions for experienced photographers ponder, as often as possible. Failing to do so, especially after years of practice and forming habits, may lead to rote and to loss of motivation. I believe that artists must always feel challenged creatively to sustain the sense of deep meaning in our work. When yesterday’s challenges have been met, we must be diligent to keep finding new ones.
Attempting to answer the “why” question at various times along one’s creative journey may be profoundly revealing—and not just in positive ways. Certainly, the answer may affirm one’s feeling of being on the “right” path (at least as one believes it to be at a point in time). However, the answer may also reveal that one has unwittingly strayed from that path, or that there may be more appropriate, more meaningful, or more rewarding paths worth exploring, suggesting it may be time to close a chapter and to begin a new one. The answer may also reveal—or force one to contend with—bad habits that are worth breaking, or make one realize that one has become too comfortable and unchallenged, and that it may be time to raise the bar—to seek new ways, learn new things, to set loftier goals, even to question former values and convictions.
Archive diving has proven for me a profound way of recalling, reconnecting with, sometimes also clarifying my “why.” Among other important realizations, archive diving has also affired for me that my “why” is not something I can entirely express to others.
Trying to put my “why” into words will inevitably yield a partial, overly simplistic, perhaps even hackneyed characterization. My “why” is by necessity subjective, deriving from my personality, my sensibilities, my psyche, my umwelt—things that, even if they could be expressed definitively in words and even if understood as intended, would feel uncomfortably invasive to me.
The “why,” to me, represents my intrinsic motivations to photograph (and write, and spend my days in the wild, and so many other things). My goal in creation is—before anything else—to elevate my own life, to deepen my own experiences, to give tangible expression to my own feelings. Others may gain a sense of my “why” when seeing my work, but it would be naïve of me to believe that, beyond some general shared values, my work and motivations would mean the same to anyone else as they do to me. Common denominators in this private realm may exist and become apparent to others, but they should not be imposed in advance. It makes little sense to me to artificially simplify my work to such a degree that others may understand it entirely and deny myself the freedom to express things regardless of whether others may understand them or find them as important as I do.
This may not be the case for people who create for extrinsic rewards, for public validation, for finding community with others. But that is not my way, and not why I create. The depth and complexity of feelings that drive my work exceeds anything I can describe (or even feel comfortable attempting to describe) to another person by words or images or any medium. Some of it, I’m sure, comes through and elicits similar feelings in others who share some of my feelings and values, but that is at best a byproduct of striving for personal expression, not my primary motivation.
I dread such questions as What is this image about? What did you try to express? What drew you to this? What is the subject of this image? I know the answers, of course. I can feel them; I can relive them in my mind, but I can’t reduce them to words. For any words to convey my “why” faithfully to another, that person would have to share my personality, in my life’s story, my memories, my circumstances, my thoughts and feelings. Even then, some important dimensions will remain beyond the reach of words.
My hope is that viewers of my work will experience it in their own ways, ensuing from the depth and complexity of their own personalities and feelings—what they believe the work to be about, what they may have felt that may have moved them to make the same image. Perhaps our perspectives may overlap to a sufficient degree that the effect would amount to Alfred Stieglitz idea of “equivalence”—a sense of shared meaning, of “reliving what had been expressed.” Perhaps not. So long as the effect for each person is meaningful and rewarding, equivalence doesn’t matter.
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I recently decided I needed another “dive.” Recent upheavals and uncertainty left me feeling that I needed to remind myself of my “why”: what kept me working and inspired in past decades. Having lost some of my passion for photography I recent years, I also wanted to acknowledge the many wonderful ways that photography has marked my life over the years: what I gained by it, the role it played in my journey to become the person I am and my life what it is. The starting point seemed obvious: I had to go to the beginning, or as close to it as I could get.
Photography for me, at least in its creative aspects, has always been a mostly solitary pursuit. On occasion, I have photographed in the company of one or two close friends, never in groups. My personality is such that I cannot feel creative or even motivated to create in a group setting. I do enjoy the occasional communal experience, especially when I teach or when debating certain topics I find interesting (e.g., creativity, philosophy, expression, qualities of experience), but never when working. My creative times (whether in the field or when working on captured images, or writings) demand a mindful state, being completely absorbed in my experience, free of distractions for prolonged periods. For better or worse, the presence of people or preoccupation with the affairs of any community or of the human world, are to me deeply disruptive forms of distraction.
~~~
I take a deep breath, cue up the music, close my eyes for a few seconds to quiet my thoughts, and then… I dive… forty years back… to revisit other lives, other places, other times, other people I once was.
I remember being a troubled, moody, and solitary teenager, riding my bicycle to remote fields, sand dunes, beaches, spending hours alone with a camera among the scents and sounds of nature—plants, animals, the sea—thrilled to discover interesting shells, rocks, butterflies, flowers, birds, savoring the experience of finding, stalking, breathing. I remember vividly my heart quickening with the rhythms and colors of nature, with skies and clouds and open spaces. I remember turning smooth focus rings of finely machined manual lenses, seeing details coming into sharp focus on a ground-glass screen. I remember the click of the shutter arousing excitement and anticipation. I remember dropping film off at night-deposit slots. Then, the wait. I remember picking the sealed envelopes, seeking a quiet place to study 5×7 prints or 4×5 slides, savoring each carefully, recalling the experiences of making them.
I remember yearning for the wild when I could not be there, in school, in military bases, in offices. I remember having my work published, in time gathering an audience and sales. I remember the day photography finally set me free from having to earn a living in other occupations.
I remember long empty roads into deserts, forests, mountains, coasts. I remember the music, the hours and days of solitary contemplation. I remember long treks in sublime places, away from roads, trails, cities, people, sometimes feeling exhausted to a point of barely being able to place one foot in front of the other. I remember my mind overwhelmed by rapturous awe as my body struggled to maintain motion. I remember views from mountain tops and canyon rims. I remember countless evening by campfires, nights looking into the vastness of a star-filled sky, sometimes in the company of dogs, sometimes with people who in time became my closest friends.
All intertwined with life events, triumphs and tragedies, times of elation and despair. Other people were rarely there. The camera was, not always used but always there when inspiration came.
I remember so many moments of existential angst. I remember affirmations arising from awe and beauty, some repeating themselves regularly: “as long as I can do this, I’ll be OK.”
In my book, More Than a Rock, I mused about significant experiences being “a kind of retirement savings—cherished moments and memories I hope to someday recall with the same bittersweet joy and gratitude I felt when experiencing them, and I will know that I had truly lived” (this is the attitude I later came to refer to as “future hindsight”). I delight in the knowledge that my intuitions were correct: that “someday” has arrived and that these memories are as—or more—valuable to me today as I had hoped they would be.
Now, so many years—sometimes decades—removed from these experiences, I am “cashing in” those “retirement savings” with ample dividends. I move from image to image and the stories weave themselves in my mind, often arousing a surprising and deeply rewarding, “oh, I remember that!”
And there it is, the “why.” So obvious, so worthwhile, so vivid, and yet beyond what I can begin to describe or put into any words, visuals, or other representation beyond recognizing it within me.
The journey continues. And someday, I’m confident, this, too, will arise from a future archive dive. I can only hope it will be as moving, as profound, as revealing, and seem as worthwhile, as this.
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