LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process Brooks Jensen

Ours is one of the first generations in all of history to have the ability to so easily record our life. But what should we record? What's worthy of preserving? Which is more important, Who-Where-When, or Stories-Thoughts, and what they Did?

Looking back, I wasted so much of my photographic youth by studiously avoiding going to the obvious and iconic landscape locations. If someone famous had photographed there, I reasoned that they'd "already done it" so there was no reason for me to go there to photograph the same things.

I'm here for a 5-hour layover at the Denver Airport. I was tempted to not record any comments in the hubbub of the airport background noise, but that led to an interesting train of thought.

It's customary to sign your finished prints in the lower right hand corner. Some people sign on the mat board, others sign on the print itself, some sign on the back of the print. They're various strategies and various philosophies about this. But what does it actually mean when you sign your print?

We are memetic creatures. We learn by observing others and then by copying what we see. This is most visible in babies and toddlers, but is equally true of artists and photographers.

Photography may not be the best medium for philosophy, but that doesn't mean that photography isn't guided, shaped, informed, influenced by a philosophical background. Said another way, art is the marriage between images and ideas. It's easy to see that photography without an image is not art. It's much more difficult to realize that photography without an idea is not art.