Creative Sparks
“Preconceptions and knowledge really only get you to the edge of where creativity begins. Then intuition and faith take over, hopefully.” - Judith Schaechter
The Habits that Spark your Creative Genius. Part II
The Cycle of Creativity Begins:
Accessing your creative genius is not a linear process; it is cyclical and doesn't follow a discrete pattern each and every time. However, there are clear habits that we can develop in order to encourage sparks to occur and to fully experience our creative genius.
Attracting spark moments typically begins with scouting. Scouting gets you in touch with the world and puts you in a position to have spark moments because you go out and about with "new" eyes-looking at things differently, taking it all in without evaluating.
As we scout, we also need to cultivate our environment—the spaces and places where we seek, spark, and sustain our creative processes. While we take in the world and fertilize the soil where ideas can grow, it's important to also remember to play. To play is to experiment, have fun, and let loose in ways that help you to feel more at ease and open to possibility.
These three habits (scouting, cultivating, and playing) are all about attracting spark moments into our purview. At some point, we attach to these sparks and consciously decide whether or not we want to advance them into tangible ideas.
To enable tangible results, the habits of venturing and harvesting are necessary. We venture-take a leap-into unknown territory in order to advance our sparks. Venturing is all about being brave, taking chances, and taking a plunge into potentially uncertain areas of opportunity that at first may feel foreign and uncomfortable. Then we harvest the results of our hard work and ideas. We view harvesting as not only the consequence of your creative efforts, but also as a ritualistic and celebratory effort at sustaining your creative genius. The more creative outcomes we reap as by-products of exercising our creative genius, the more motivated we are to stimulate and produce additional creative results. Harvesting, like the other habits, becomes contagious when we exercise it on a regular basis.
While each habit is different, they are interrelated. The more you develop each habit in connection with the others, the more your creative genius will grow and consequently produce stimulating outcomes.
Stimulated. Habits to Spark Your Creative Genius.
Andrew Pek and Jeannine McGlade
Bringing the Exotic Near
“Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art. “ -Freya Stark
Sontag On Photography - part II
Bringing the exotic near, rendering the familiar and homely exotic, photographs make the entire world available as an object of appraisal. For photographers who are not confined to projecting their own obsessions, there are arresting moments, beautiful subjects everywhere. The most heterogeneous subjects are then brought together in the fictive unity offered by the ideology of humanism. Thus, according to one critic, the greatness of Paul Strand's pictures from the last period of his life-when he turned from the brilliant discoveries of the abstracting eye to the touristic, world-anthologizing tasks of photography - consists in the fact that "his people, whether Bowery derelict, Mexican peon, New England farmer, Italian peasant, French artisan, Breton or Hebrides fisherman, Egyptian fellahin, the village idiot or the great Picasso, are all touched by the same heroic quality - humanity." What is this humanity? It is a quality things have in common when they are viewed as photographs.
The force of a photograph is that it keeps open to scrutiny, instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces. This freezing of time - the insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph - has produced new and more inclusive canons of beauty.
Photographs depict realities that already exist, though only the camera can disclose them. And they depict an individual temperament, discovering itself through the camera's cropping of reality. Every portrait of another person is a "self-portrait" of the photographer, as for Minor White-promoting "self-discovery through a camera"-landscape photographs are really "inner landscapes."
László Moholy-Nagy's demand for the photographer's self-effacement follows from his appreciation of how edifying photography is: it retains and upgrades our powers of observation, it brings about "a psychological transformation of our eyesight." (In an essay published in 1936, he says that photography creates or enlarges eight distinct varieties of seeing: abstract, exact, rapid, slow, intensified, penetrative, simultaneous, and distorted.) But self-effacement is also the demand behind quite different, anti-scientific approaches to photography, such as that expressed in Robert Frank's credo: "There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment." In both views the photographer is proposed as a kind of ideal observer - for Moholy-Nagy, seeing with the detachment of a researcher; for Frank, seeing "simply, as through the eyes of the man in the street."
On Photography
Susan Sontag