That sounds like a sensible approach, Martin. Thanks.
Ok how can we investigate further ....
I don’t feel the ‘clock’ approach is the same as defining genres. Even the Barret categories are not like that. This plays on a different level of understanding.
I’m helped when I understand to what I look, and it helps me to understand why I do things in my creative process. And eventually it could help me in how I look at things and how I bring it together in a picture.
I ‘m so intrigued in La Chapelle and how he works and I can’t help to see underlying patterns that reminds me to Witkin, I want to understand, or holistically feel, how and why ‘I’ see this familiarity. That break trough could be the start of a new artistic flow to create some pictures.
And before somebody throw up that the urge to create is something that comes as natural, think twice. I feel it is a struggle inside and things don’t come easy.
Ivo, I can understand how you may believe in systems as aids to creativity because, as far as I can tell, you are from an engineering background, so systems are part of your life. My engineering background was four years as apprentice, after which I got myself transferred, in the fifth year, into the company photo department, and never did anything else but photography for the rest of my career. I hated engineering life, and only got into it to avoid a worse one in the armed forces. My natural driving force has been from within, and on a very unclear kind of level where it has never been quantified, qualified or analysed: it just is - almost wrote was - and because of that built-in nature of the thing, I feel no need to question it or to try and channel it in some way: it knows all by itself what it wants the rest of me to do.
Frankly, looking at your clocks etc. frightens me. It appears to be such an artificial, mechanistic way of cutting up one's own soul much in the way that an autopsy would achieve. You may have sussed that, as did Jeanloup Sieff, I hold a very low opinion of those who take art and try to turn it into brand, force eqivalents and measures of worth betwen artists and, even worse, push some to financial success at the cost of others and sail on sweetly to wealth aboard their collective ship of cynicism, favouritism and hype.
Of course there is a struggle within; the first one is about what to do at all; is it even worth getting out of bed this chilly morning? The next one is often that of money: what can I or must I do to pay the rent and light bills? (Echoes there of Leiter, who should know.)
Other photographers of note or noteriety. The only ones that I want to know anything about are the ones whose work grabs me. It always starts with the work. I have no interest in names, and working my way through a catalogue simply to tick boxes and highten my awareness score and imagined street cred is not something I waste my life attempting. Let a great pìcture catch my eye and then yes, the inquisitive fuse is lit and the Internet gets my attention right away. Sadly, there are either fewer and fewer such names to research, or I have already found most of them and the world is less full of glory than I'd hoped.
Comfort zones. I think them essential. Having found one
Piss Christ I have no wish to find it or its relatives ever again; having seen one defiled, mutilated and dishonoured human remain I have no wish to gaze upon more of them. The world contains so much pain, ugliness and horror as it is, that avoiding it seems to make greater sense. Far bettee to try and see where the other foot of that rainbow is resting. The may be no crock of gold, but why not something even better?
