Fine Art Photography and Something Else
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I’ve discovered a lot about my fine art photography in this lockdown-project and made many aspects explicit. I've a better sense of what I’m trying to do; how I do it; how it makes me feel; how I benefit; and the directions I can take it in the future. Overall, the benefits feel more beneficial because I've made them explicit. But I've a niggling idea that something else is happening which, as yet, I can’t quite pinpoint. There’s something about my fine art which is operating at an unconscious level, and which remains stubbornly, elusively unconscious!
I've looked back through the notes I made at the beginning of this project and the ones I've made en route, but no joy there. All I do know is that whatever this elusive quality is (which I’m calling ‘it’), I feel better for it!
This is my best guess …
My engineer’s mind loves the clarity and orderliness of the engineering and academic worlds I've inhabited in the past. In those worlds, raw data can be transformed into useful, usable information; trends identified; outliers noted; it can all be modelled mathematically – so, so elegant. My engineer’s mind is in seventh heaven; confident, assured, secure. But the rest of life – the rest of the ‘real’ world – isn’t like that, is it? It’s messy, emotional, irrational, unpredictable, random and – particularly during a pandemic – scary. It won’t yield to the needs of my engineer’s mind.
But there seems to be a bit of me (the bit which does the fine art photography) which is saying “that’s ok, it doesn’t matter” and saying “messy, emotional, irrational is ok, it’s not as alarming as you think.”
That seems to be how my fine art photography operates. It helps me to process my encounters with this ‘real,’ messy, irrational world. (It works retrospectively as well, to help me process past clashes with the real world – particularly difficult ones – which I’ve bottled up inside, till now). And some time later, when the image is complete, and I’m holding the finished print in my hand, this process is reinforced; the print acts to anchor and stabilise me further, soothing and calming.
But, if that is not enough, and the real world threatens to overwhelm me, my engineering persona steps in to help – to take my fine art photography onto safer, less emotional territory. Thus, for example, I followed the very emotional series ‘Two Titles’ (which addresses medical trauma) by ‘One Thousand Years’ (which looks back across the centuries to the building of York Minster).
So I haven’t fully succeeded in my lockdown-quest to make this elusive aspect into an explicit, definitive explanation – but I feel I’m getting there. I've taken my understanding significantly further. And it has reinforced the most important aspect – that my fine art photography has the power to make me feel better.
#Art for Recovery