Years ago I wrote a letter to a woman named Jennifer. A collection of many people I know and who’ve asked me questions over the years, Jennifer was more a symbol than a real person, but my words to her couldn’t have been more true. Today I got a letter from Emily. It could have been anyone, or everyone. You, …
Composition: The Power of Simplicity
“Simplify, simplify, simplify.” ~ Henry David Thoreau “One ‘simplify’ would have sufficed.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson It took me years to figure out that photographic composition is about organization of elements in the frame, that making a photograph has so much more to do with my decisions than it does with the scene in front of me. Before that realization, …
Hone Your Creativity: 3 Ways
Two weeks ago I published Leaving Dafen (From Craft to Art), an article that discusses the shift from craft to art; rather, it promises that such a shift was possible and points out the need for courage to make it happen. It’s not an easy subject, nor one I intend to make simple. But I think that at the …
Leaving Dafen (From Craft to Art)
There is a village in China where thousands of painters make their living together, painting away their days in spartan studios, covered in paint, surrounded by canvases. The village is called Dafen, and it intrigues me because, for all the technical prowess possessed by the painters in that community, it is not known for its art. Not really. That is …
Better Than Like
The making of art, and the appreciation of it, is a subjective thing. It is deeply personal, and this is one of its strengths, not a weakness. But there’s a danger in seeing art in such personal, subjective terms, and that hazard is no more clearly seen than in the oft-used word, “like.” As in, “Oh, I really like that …
What it Feels Like
If you got my Contact Sheet on January 23, you’ve already read this, but if you didn’t, read on! Painter Robert Henri (1865–1929) admonished his students to “Paint the spirit of the bird in flight, not its feathers.” His words have echoed with me since I heard them, joining photographer David Alan Harvey’s plea: “Don’t shoot what it looks like, …
How To Get Sh*t Done
Have you ever felt like you’re insanely busy but not actually accomplishing anything? Like you’re frantically doing stuff but never getting stuff done? Being creative, no matter what the discipline or genre means making things, it means creating, and to do that – whether it’s one photograph or a significant body of work, never mind all the things we need …
The One About Creative Burnout
I’m tired. Not like the “I need a nap” kind of tired, but the kind of tired that goes into your soul and slows your thinking and makes you dread the things you were so excited to put on the calendar only a few months ago. The kind of tired that feels like the first signs of burning out. And …
How to Deal with Creative Boredom
I get about a dozen emails or comments on social media every month asking me what to do when you wake up one day and you realize you’re bored and you feel like your photographs are boring and because the only only thing worse than making boring photographs is being bored yourself, and because I think there’s a connection, I …
Is Composition Over-rated?
Sometimes the strangest things show up like unexpected gifts on the doorstep – like the comment I got just yesterday that told me (I’m paraphrasing) that all my talk about composition and storytelling was nonsense. The less-paraphrased version was that scenes are what they are and they compose themselves. I’m not going to lie: I would have laughed if it …