The subconscious plays a great part in art, that is to say that in conceiving & realizing a work a great deal happens which cannot be logically explained–the mind jumps from one stage to another much further on without there being traceable steps shown between – sudden solutions which cannot be followed step by step–in a word–inspiration.
—Henry Moore
I recently joined fellow photographer David Ulrich for a panel discussion on the topic of the creative process, offered to members of The Nook Community. Opening the conversation, host Adriana Cerundolo asked David and me this question: “what does the creative process mean to you?”
I emphasized the words “to you” since they make Adriana’s question both poignant and scientifically correct. Despite so many attempts to formalize and study the creative process, it turns out that the process of making creative work is, at least in some of its aspects, personal. As psychologist and creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton put it in an article titled, “Creative Ideas and the Creative Process: Good News and Bad News for the Neuroscience of Creativity”:
A creative idea cannot originate via the straightforward application of well-established disciplinary procedures . . . such ideas must be considered routine, reproductive, or habitual rather than truly creative. So what neuroscientists must scrutinize is the creative process that applies to all domains of creativity. Now comes the bad news: There’s no such thing as the creative process! At the very least we must speak in the plural, multiple processes rather than a single process.
Before elaborating on the personal aspects of creativity, and specifically about their implications in creative photography, it’s worth reviewing some of the history behind the idea of the creative process, at least as far as we understand it given the complexity of the topic.
In his 1926 book, The Art of Thought, Graham Wallas offered a creative process framework that is often cited and elaborated on in creativity research to this day, a century later. Wallas’s framework was not limited to just artistic creativity but attempted to characterize the creative process more generally. This, it turned out, limited its usefulness a bit. We now know that in addition to a general creative process framework, creative ideas in different areas (e.g., art, science, engineering, social interaction, etc.) also rely on some domain-specific processes and rely to varying degree on subjective factors, such as personality traits, cognitive skills, attitude, and personal circumstances.
Wallas’s creative process framework consists of four phases:
- Preparation: a conscious and deliberate phase of characterizing, researching, and contemplating the problem we seek a creative solution to.
- Incubation: an unconscious phase when we are not deliberately working on—or even thinking about—the problem while various processes in our brains continue to work on it. These processes take into account what we know about the problem (informed by the preparation phase) as well as other knowledge we may possess, seek connections and associations between the problem and other knowledge, and other activities we have no conscious insight into.
- Illumination: the proverbial “aha!” moment when, after some period of incubation, we suddenly become conscious of a possible—albeit often rudimentary and incomplete—solution to the problem.
- Verification: a conscious phase in which we take the possible solution, consider its viability, fill in missing data, think about how we may implement it, and finally verify its appropriateness and usefulness.
To help narrow the discussion specifically to artistic creativity (rather than, say, academic creativity, creativity in the workplace, or creativity other domains), we can say that as visual artists the “problem” we are attempting to “solve” is an aesthetic and/or expressive problem: how to create something that is beautiful/interesting to behold and that conveys certain meanings or emotions to those who encounter it, and how to do so within the constraints of our medium—our tools and materials.
An immediate challenge emerging out of Wallas’s framework comes from the fact that the creative process involves both conscious and unconscious phases, only the former of which are within our control.
We may invest a great deal of time and effort in the (conscious) preparation phase: hone our technical skills, learn about our subjects and medium, research what other people may have done or thought about the (aesthetic/expressive) problem we are seeking to solve. However, once we have exhausted all we can do in preparation, we must then hand things off to the unconscious incubation phase, with no guarantee that a solution will present itself or any estimate of how long it may take. Once we are done preparing and start incubating, Wallas suggested, we should make sure “either to think on other subjects than the proposed problem, or to rest from any form of conscious thought.”
Clearly, this passage from (conscious) preparation to (unconscious) incubation is especially problematic in photography. In many situations, our window of opportunity to make a photograph may be very short and insufficient for proper incubation. Unlike, say, writers or painters, we don’t usually have the luxury of waiting too long for the moment of illumination—the “aha!” moment when our unconscious brains finish the incubation phase and present a possible solution to our conscious brain.
Our subjects are often not static; the light may change as we wait; we may have to leave and not be able to return to our subjects until later (or not at all). Nevertheless, incubation must happen sometime if we aspire to make truly creative work.
In practical terms, if we wish to be creative in our photographic work, we must pursue at least one of two strategies: find ways to shorten or shortcut the incubation period and/or shift the incubation phase to another time when we dohave the luxury of waiting, rather than when faced with a subject or scene we wish to photograph.
While strategies for shortening the incubation phase do exist, we must approach them with caution. The reason for caution is that the length of the incubation period is (generally, not always) known to correlate with the magnitude of creativity: the longer we incubate, the more creative the solution we end up with is likely to be. Skipping or shortening the incubation phase too much may result in uncreative or less creative solutions than we might come up with if we had the luxury of waiting longer.
One strategy for shortening the incubation phase is what Albert Einstein termed “combinatory play.” As the name suggests, it involves combining working on (and thinking about) the desired problem with other activities (in Einstein’s case, he would take breaks from his mathematical work to play his violin). For photographers, combinatory play might mean combining the search for a composition with occasional breaks to pursue other activities, such as writing in a journal, responding to emails, perhaps socializing, taking a meal, or even just daydreaming while looking at clouds. The important aspect of combinatory play is to cease thinking about the problem and to switch your attention completely(!) to something entirely unrelated, allowing the unconscious process involved in incubation to function uninterrupted.
(As an aside, in his book, Wallas also suggested the possibility of hastening the moment of illumination when, after sufficient incubation had occurred, we get a feeling that a solution is close by, even if we don’t yet know what it is—a sense that something is on the “top of the tongue” but not quite yet known. Wallas termed this feeling Intimation. He suggested that when we feel intimation, we become more motivated to pursue a problem and may be able to shift more cognitive resources toward it, but at the same time we are also in danger of sabotaging ourselves if we consciously interfere too much with the workings of the unconscious brain. Alas, to my knowledge very little research has gone into studying the feeling of intimation and how we may be able to tap into it to shorten the incubation phase.)
~~~
As I mentioned, shortening the incubation phase by attempting to consciously force a solution before the incubation period had sufficient time to work on the problem may have the undesirable effect of lessening the magnitude of creativity. This is a good argument in favor of pursuing strategies for shifting the incubation phase to times when we can afford to allow our unconscious brain the time it needs to incubate properly, rather than attempt to shorten or shortcut the incubation phase when we are in a rush to find a solution.
It may seem that in photography the moment of illumination—when the unconscious incubation work is done and an idea suddenly presents itself to the conscious brain—is the moment just before we turn to the camera to compose and capture a photograph. Not so! At least, it doesn’t have to be.
Creativity in photography is very much like the creativity of jazz musicians who improvise in real time. It may seem like a jazz player is creating new music entirely in real time, with no incubation period. But this is only partially true. In fact, much of the incubation happens long before the performance.
Brain imaging experiments show an interesting phenomenon occurring in jazz musicians as they improvise: a brain region known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), which in normal times serves as a mechanism for impulse control (and by extension has the effect of dampening creativity) becomes temporarily inhibited or deactivated, allowing the brain to make connections and associations among brain regions that would otherwise be prevented by the dlPFC. Can we photographers benefit from this effect too? The answer is: yes, we can. But, like jazz musicians, we must train ourselves—hard and repetitively over a prolonged period—to do so.
Part of the training comes from investing effort and time in the preparation phase. As neuroscientist and Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel explained in his book, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves:
Simply turning off the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex won’t turn any of us into a great pianist, however. These [jazz] pianists benefited from the lifting of inhibitions only because they, like most other successful creative people, had spent years practicing their art form, filling their brains with musical ideas that they could spontaneously recombine onstage.
Beyond intense preparation, improvising musicians (and other creative artists) also often engage in “offline” incubation: imagining various problems and scenarios—playing imaginary performances, visualizing possible approaches and images, forming art in their mind’s eyes and ears.
As photographers, we may trigger incubation at any time by posing hypothetical visual problems for ourselves. For example, we may imagine ourselves standing in front of an old tree and think about how we may compose an image of it that will express expresses joy (or yearning, or sadness, or anything else). We may contemplate how we could use certain colors or lines or shapes or geographic feature to communicate, say, a sense of peace (or grace, or tension, or some gesture). We can do so at any time and allow our brains to incubate on these problems for days or weeks or longer. When a possible solution (i.e., a moment of illumination) presents itself, we may then even continue to the verification phase by visualizing a desired photograph, making a sketch, or describing it in words to test its appropriateness and tenability.
If we have the luxury to do so, we may also visit with subjects or places deliberately intending to explore and experience them and think about how we may photograph them without feeling compelled to capture any images. We may then take the time to incubate ideas for how we may photograph these places or subjects at a future time. In effect, such strategies allow our unconscious brain ample time to incubate ideas so the “aha!” moment—whenever it occurs, even with no camera at hand—will guide our choices at a future time.
In his Daybooks, Edward Weston described this effect perfectly, in terms easily translatable into Wallas’s phases of the creative process (which I added in square braces). Weston wrote:
Now one does not think during creative work [incubation]: any more than one thinks when driving a car. One has a background of years [preparation]—learning—unlearning—success—failure—dreaming—thinking—experience—back it goes—farther back than one’s ancestors: all this,—then the moment of creation [illumination], the focussing of all into the moment. So I can make—“without thought”—fifteen carefully-considered [verification] negatives one every fifteen minutes,—given material with as many possibilities.
~~~
Returning to the topic of creativity—and the creative process—being different and personal for different people working in different domains, consider that creativity depends on many factors, only some of which are within our control. Among the individual factors we cannot control, creativity is known to be correlated with certain personality traits (primarily the trait known as openness to experience), which are determined to a significant degree by genetic predisposition and by individual life experiences. Some aspects of creativity are also known to correlate with the presence, absence, or severity of certain psychological disorders.
Among the individual factors we can control, creativity is correlated with the effort and time one may invest in the preparation phase, which includes such things as depth and breadth of one’s knowledge, length and intensity of experience, level of (formal or self-gained) education, especially in art, strength of memory, mastery of technical skills, and other factors that some individuals may possess to different degrees than others. Creativity is also correlated with the amount of time one allows for incubation of creative ideas, and with certain attitudes and practices conducive to productive incubation.
Alas, for many photographers, preparation amounts to little more than memorizing camera functions and lens specifications, and/or sussing out locations where other photographers have made good work with the explicit intent of traveling there to make copies and derivations of these works (an attitude that is not just uncreative but, when taken to extremes, is outright anti-creative).
Few photographers include in their preparation time to study the works and writings of other photographers and visual artists (or even adopt the curious practice of deliberately avoiding the influence of others). Fewer still take the time to study some of the relevant science concerning visual perception (e.g., Gestalt theory) and artistic expression (e.g., Neuroaesthetics).
Although creativity is a complex topic that even scientists who study it understand only partially, I hope I have demonstrated here that there is in fact a lot we do know about the creative process and some ways it may differ from one person to another. With this knowledge, we can train ourselves to become more creative photographers and artists. That is, if we are willing to invest the time and effort, to adopt the attitudes, and to take the risks to make ourselves more creative.
The image summarizes this post by intimating a view of the brain with its variety of mass shapes, hills and valleys, rivers and creeks, all within a limited color palette. In other words, creativity as a function of the brain is rather complex even in its simplified explanation.