Opportunity = Choice

Early this summer I had an unusual experience.  I scheduled a few days to photograph with a student I had worked with a number of years ago. He was retired, an avid photographer, rekindling his passion for working with his view camera, and he was recovering from a stroke. I spoke with him about what he wanted to photograph and with his wife about his physical limitations. It was agreed that with me as “assistant,” Fort Knox and the Olson House would be good locations for us to focus on. We had a great first day shooting. The weather was perfect, we enjoyed catching up through a day of leisurely conversations and when I dropped him off at the hotel for dinner with his wife he was tired but happy. His wife called me at 6:30 the next morning to say that he had suffereda massive stroke in the night and was dying.

Although he was not my closest friend, we were well acquainted, having worked together several times over the years as well as spending the entire previous day photographing. So, his death struck close to home. Thinking about the events of that week I’ve had a few thoughts…

Life is short. We never know when the end of our days is coming. This friend’s death reminded me of this truth. His determination to make photographs made it possible for him to spend his last day of life as a photographer. He chose to put making photographs before anything else on his “to do” list. Over the years I have learned that if I don’t go out and make new photographs at every opportunity I will spend my life talking about work that I did further and further in the past. Opportunity = Choice. I make my opportunities every day, making the choice to photograph rather than doing other things. Every day brings new choices, new opportunities for how I spend my time. I hope that the drive and determination to make photographs stays with me until my own last day is spent.

I can’t spend each day behaving as if it is the last day of my life. That means I can’t just photograph all day, every day. I also have to take care of the routine and mundane details that make it possible for me to photograph. I have to make time for the people and other things in my life that are important to me. I value being a part of a family, having friends, being involved in my community. I am a lucky man to be able to spend weeks at a time making photographs, but these are balanced out by time spent in my darkroom, in the office and in the classroom teaching. If I spend every day doing just what I want, justifying my actions because “it might be my last day” then everything that makes it possible to photograph will disappear and in the end I won’t be able to make photographs. Furthermore, always living on the edge of life being over doesn’t leave much room for being open to life’s possibilities. In fact, it seems a pretty “glass half empty” way of living.

So how do I combine these nearly opposite dictums? Every day I try to take care of what is important to me, with an eye towards the future. I tell the people I love that I love them, every day. Every day I try to follow my passion and figure out a way to make a living out of that passion. By planning, I make it possible to follow my dreams into the future. I plan workshops, photo projects, and schedule time in the darkroom. When I’m not out photographing I take care of business, answer phone calls and emails, prepare for upcoming workshops, reworking them from the experiences gained by teaching them. I make time for my family, make the effort to get regular exercise, keep in touch with friends. Every day I try to do the little things that keep my life balanced.

By planning for the future I take care of the present. By keeping in touch with those who are important to me I stay grounded, and by making time for my photography I follow my passion. I may not be able to spend my last day on earth making photographs, but if I have made photographs whenever possible, planned for the future, and told those I love I love them, then when my last day comes I will, hopefully, have no regrets.

Follow your passion. Take care of the everyday things that allow you to do this and tell those you love that you love them.

All the best,

Tillman

I have been repeatedly invited to be a “friend” on Facebook and consistently decline the opportunity. The subject came up again at a recent photographers’ retreat in New Jersey with the conversation focused on the wonderful marketing tool it was. Though the discussion was lively and instructional it only served to reinforce my position on Facebook.

Instant Reaction

I am drawn to well thought out ideas and arguments. I read newspapers and magazines and follow many online sources for content about the world around me. Each morning I read the editorials and commentaries in my local newspaper. Liberal or conservative, it doesn’t matter. George Will or Ellen Goodman, with opposing opinions, provide me the opportunity to think outside my box. Both write columns that are intelligent, well researched and thoughtful about their subjects. Facebook seems to approach communication from just the opposite – instant thoughts and instant feedback. For myself, I just don’t think this way. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in trouble because I reacted instantly, said something I later regretted, praised something that, upon consideration, wasn’t praiseworthy, or condemned something that turned out to be worthwhile. Fortunately, on most of these occasions, I spoke out of turn rather than in writing, which could last forever.

My perception of Facebook is that frequency of updates is the attraction. People seem disappointed if they aren’t receiving updates all the time and consequently act pressured to provide the same. This is simply not how I work. I use film and a large format camera because it slows me down, physically, mentally and emotionally. Before I could post an image I would need to process the film, make a contact print and then scan and adjust in Photoshop the negative before I could put it up on the internet. Hmm, I wonder why I would even want to do that when I haven’t had time to decide if I even like the image.

Furthermore, and no offense meant, but I’m not particularly interested in sharing the intimacies of my day, my mistakes or my struggles with the rest of the world. I have a wife, a few great friends and a therapist for all that. Being a “friend” to these people is more than enough of a challenge for me!

Time

Another point on which I take issue with Facebook is time. Time spent on Facebook is time not spent doing other things. We all have the same amount of time each day and we’re each free to choose how we spend it. I want to spend my time my way but the demands of self-employment, and being a husband, father, son and friend, often require that I spend it in other ways. I spend some time each day answering email in my office. I can get distracted following links, connecting with friends, answering questions for students. Then there seem to be those time swallowing details of keeping up my website, preparing and debriefing from workshops, preparing exhibits and working on business needs that keep me from photographing or making prints. In order to add Facebook entries into the mix I would have to give something up and I am not willing to do so. I just don’t believe that for the images I make and how I teach and the books I sell that the trade off is worth it to me.

Furthermore, it was suggested that someone other than myself could do these entries. My sons are away at school, can’t afford the assistant and my wife would divorce me if I suggested she might do so. Again, not how any of us are choosing to spend our time.

Privacy

Now for the issue of privacy. If you and I have a conversation about our photographs it is a private conversation between the two of us. Whether it is face to face, over the phone or by email, it is a private conversation about something we both care about. What is said should be of no importance to the rest of the world and I would hope we could be frank, thoughtful and illuminating of each other’s work. Our conversation would be very different if either of us thought the world was listening in. It would become a conversation where the audience was our major concern rather than the work we both care about.

Credibility

In any forum, particularly online forums where everyone is using a “handle” or “screen name” there is little determination for credibility. People who know nothing or very little about a subject can sound highly authoritative. If someone is posting a review or comment on your work how do you know who he or she are, what his or her experience or training is? Do they have the gravitas to speak on the subject? Have they thought about photography or your work? Do they care about your work or are they just looking for something to say? Should you care about what they are saying?

Interconnectivity

Facebook searches the web looking for people who share the same background, experiences, likes and dislikes and connects the dots so to speak. It allows people to get in touch with each other. This broadened exposure is a seemingly good reason to be on Facebook. However, if anyone wants to find me, all they have to do is Google “Tillman Crane” and there I am. On the other hand I can’t stop Google from bringing up my name but it doesn’t (I don’t think) “listen in” on my email conversations, sell my likes and dislikes, or own the images I put up on my website. Facebook “owns” and can use for its own purposes any images I put up on its network.

In summary, if you want to have a conversation about photography, yours or mine, get in touch with me and I will take it seriously. It will be a private conversation, not open to audience participation. Any work I put on my website or in my books or in an exhibit you can know that I have deliberately edited and carefully presented. It is the best I can offer at that point in time. I hope that when I post a new Musing that, like George Will or Ellen Goodman, that it is worth the time it takes for you to read it. At the very least I will do my best to think it though and write it as best I can. You may agree or disagree, or it simply may not speak to you, but I hope you won’t feel you wasted your time reading it.

Facebook may be the greatest social networking creation ever but I choose not to be a part of it. However, if you are and want to share my work with others then please direct them to my web site at www.tillmancrane.com or have them send me an email at tillman@tillmancrane.com. Or call us 207-230-0199. We make the time to answer the phone and return an email. You may even get a letter from us. If I don’t answer right away it’s because I am, hopefully, out making photographs or in the darkroom printing. I am doing what I am passionate about. And so, I hope, are you.

Tillman

What a great button the “delete” button is. I am sometimes envious of photographers using digital cameras because the equipment allows for instant feedback as well as removal of images that don’t work. For myself, working with traditional equipment and film I don’t see what’s on the film until long after I’ve left my subject. As I’ve written before, for me this is a good system. I like (and need) the separation of time and space between making an image and evaluating the processed negative because it allows me to see my work from a bit of distance. This “distance” brings opportunity to both evaluate the merits of the negative as well as decide where to take the image with printing. However this way of working has certain (more…)

For me, beauty is optimism made visible. In earlier newsletters this year we have talked about working within ourselves, using what is at hand and making images close to home, giving ourselves permission to take an hour out of our busy weeks to make photographs, to be aware while we are making images perhaps finding new images in our “mistakes”, and celebrating the fact that we are creative people. Every one of us is creative in one way or another. I see creativity as optimism, and I think it is optimism that has gotten us through the past year. If we are still able to go out and make images we care about even when it feels like the world is filled with chaos and tragedy, the act is both creative and beautiful. If I let worry and fear enter my creative sphere then I am not ready or able to do the work I want and need to do.

It has been a good, if tough, fourteen months for Donna and myself. November 2008 our third book, Odin Stone, arrived from the bindery. We had worked most of the previous year raising the money for publication and organizing these images of the Orkney Islands from concept to completion. It debuted that November with an exhibit at the Addison Woolley Gallery in Portland (ME). Within days we began the layout work for A Walk Along The Jordan, which arrived by truck the day before we left for Utah for the opening exhibit of this work at the Salt Lake Arts Center. Odin Stone covered work created between 2002 and 2007 while most of the images for A Walk Along the Jordan were photographed primarily between February 2006 and October 2008. (There are some images shot before 2006 but not many.) So for a while I was photographing and organizing for two books at the same time.

If you look at the two books side by side, you will notice an overlap in style, technique, and vision. Although they cover different subject matter they are both about relating to and experiencing a specific environment. In one sense Odin Stone was easier to shoot because of the uniqueness (to me) of the environment. In that same sense the Jordan River project was much tougher because it was an area familiar to me, in my back yard so to speak. I didn’t have the experience of “going” somewhere special to make photographs. I got in the car, drove a few blocks or a few miles and began walking along the river trying to see something new and different. It was in every sense an ordinary location, in some places the river beautiful, in others less so. When I told people I was working on a book on the Orkney Islands they may not have known where it was but when I told them it was in Scotland they understood why I would want to photograph there. On the other hand when I told people I was photographing along the Jordan River, most asked “Why”?

I photographed along the Jordan River in a sense because it was there. I was in Utah teaching and my family was back in Maine. It was what I did on the weekends. It was a challenge to make something beautiful out of something ordinary. The more I walked along the river the more I began to I understand its place in the community. The more I studied its history the more important it became to me. Essentially photographing the river provided me a reason to get out and make photographs, and from that grew the challenge to myself to produce a coherent body of work from this ordinary place. It reinforced my belief that there was much to learn from photographing in my own “backyard”. I remembered that I didn’t need the excitement (or time and expense) of distant travel to see with fresh eyes. In many ways this idea is what I have been trying to write about over the past year: finding the beauty where I am as well as in who I am. It is, in a sense, in rediscovering the beauty that lies within my own vision I can better appreciate that found in the vision of others.

It is indeed a form of optimism that allows me to got out and seek such beauty. As the days continue to shorten over these next weeks let us remember to use the power of our individual creativities to remain optimistic. Make images for yourself as you move into the New Year of possibilities.

I wish you much joy this Holiday season!

Tillman