LensWork - Photography and the Creative Process Brooks Jensen

A book is not artwork, but a novel is. A book is a medium of delivery, a novel is the content that is delivered. Does the same logic apply to photography? What if I said that a print or a book is a medium of delivery the same way that an LP or a CD is a medium of delivery for music, but neither are the artwork itself?

We can't make artwork without craft, but craft without content is not art. When the two become fused, then there arises a magic that can take our breath away. I was reminded of this recently looking at some Albrecht Dürer original engravings.

Dynamic range is a bit of a technical topic for this podcast, but it's also an aesthetic one. I've recently become aware of this because of the photography I was doing at the Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. My inspiration for this work was from Linda Butler in her wonderful and very influential book, Inner Light: The Shaker Legacy.

I love photographing in the fog. It has a way of turning the most complex landscapes into minimalist compositions. Snow can do the same thing. Strangely enough, I can be just as fascinated with the opposite of fog or snow, that is, incredibly complex patterns that seem quite chaotic. For me, the most difficult compositions are the ones in between that are neither minimalist nor cacophonous.

I believe there are three miracles of human invention that continue to amaze me that they even exist at all. These are language and writing (books), the aural arts (music, recordings), and the visual arts (painting, photography). Through writing we can know what Sophocles thought millennia ago; through audio recordings we can hear what our grandparents sounded like; and via photography we can see the world that no longer exists.

Finishing a photography project has multiple rewards not least of which is the manifestation of the artwork we produce. However, perhaps the most important thing we gain by finishing a project is what we learn in the process. Each project is a teacher as well as a culmination of our efforts.