***The job of the photographer is not to produce a decoration for other people’s walls and homes, but it is the real voyage of discovery and is an authentic way to go through life, a way of discovering things, finding things, experiencing things.**
Michael Kenna
All artists go through the same journey through their artistic life, and I am no different. I have gone through the learning the craft stage, such as the use of the camera to learning about composition, tonality, color theory, post-processing, and so on. I have gone through phases of learning to communicate through vocabulary pertinent to my photography, through visual communication through my work, or through finding community to share my thoughts and work. I have had to learn about extrinsic versus intrinsic validation. I have had to learn to “see” not only with my eyes but with my memories, my heart, and my imagination.
I am redoing my website to explore a deeper direction for my journey. I am searching for an understanding of creativity, art, and meaningful images as part of my photography. As I have researched some reasons why people have created art, the opinions are overwhelming. Many of the ideas I read from the ancient Greeks to thinkers of today are thoughtful, but try to get them down to one word, sentence, or paragraph. It’s hard!
My conclusion is that we each need to come up with our own definitions and be able to explain our definitions if we are to grow. This part of my journey is to explain how I see meaningful images, creativity, and art in my work with my own words.
Ken Carlson