“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” – Thomas Merton
How can we use the art we make with the camera to grow, learn and provide ourselves with a way of saying new things… to, as Merton says, “find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time”?
I’m asking listeners to help steer the future direction of Camera Position by letting me know what you’d like to hear.
When the subject takes precedence – when you point your camera at things that are the most interesting thing to you – you are on your way to developing a personal style – the sense that these subjects are the most important things and can only be pointed out in this way by you.
“To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care.” Anne Lamott – Bird by Bird
How do we go beyond a record of a place and begin to make photographs that convey a real sense of place? The objective is not just to show what your destination looks like, but rather to convey, in photographs, what it felt like to be there.
This episode is a little meditation on the importance of aligning ourselves with the messages around us, using Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird as inspiration.
“The Gulf Stream will flow through a straw provided the straw is aligned to the Gulf Stream, and not at cross purposes with it.”
-Anne Lamott
“But the art in an artwork might not be located precisely where you thought it was. Perhaps it was just as much in the damage and decay as it was in the intact original. Perhaps it was in the gaps – in contemplating and rending those insults and injuries – that we find ourselves, by compassion; by bandaging, however imperfectly, those wounds. Art may be a species of faith, the assurance of things hoped for. It contains nothing so much as our wish that we persist.”
