Motivation

What is it that drives us to create, to discover something new, or just want to keep learning? I go through periods of intense creativity and then long patches of the doldrums where noting seems to inspire. You would think after many years of making photographic images I would have a better understanding of the creative cycle and be more accepting of it, but I am not. I am sure most creative persons has asked themselves these types of question many times. How do we balance this cycle of the creative process? I think sometimes we need to step away from what we are doing and clear our minds of the pursuit we are on. Sometimes we are simply over trying and making ourselves frustrated. Second we all have the tendency to compare ourselves to others. It is easy in the current social media world to ask ourselves why do some people get all the attention and our work gets overlooked. That is another trap that will completely engulf you if you put your focus there. But then there is another aspect creatives all deal with. You ask yourself, "I've created so much stuff what is the point of making anymore"? Just yesterday I was going through some of my many archival boxes of my darkroom prints that were fully matted and ended up putting them in the trash can. Then today I am putting together this above image in a matte and a frame, and the haunting question came again, "why make more"? After so many years what is the point, no one is going to buy it, and it will end up in my closet with a bunch of others. But a voice in my head asked me "do you enjoy it"? and my answer was yes. So the voice said, then keep doing it. In life we need to focus on the journey and not the destination. As artist we are always looking for the completed piece but in our minds it is never truly completed. There is always something we could add or change, and that is ok. Just keep doing what brings you joy.

Death Valley 2011

We have made many trips to Death Valley and each time I find it a fascinating place to explore and photograph. I like going back in my files and find new images to work on that I previous overlooked. Certainly the process in Photoshop has improved greatly since I made this image. This is another sleepless night for me so I decided to work in my modern day darkroom (photoshop) to help clear my mind of events of the previous day. I enjoy the quiet time in the middle of the night. The quietness takes me back to my darkroom days where I spent thousands of hours standing alone in the dark to make my images. The work of the darkroom process is a difficult one but renders the most satisfaction for me personally when doing photographing printing. This image was made shortly after sunrise out on the Dunes. Death Valley is a special place to visit and you might consider making the trip yourself one day

Time

Time is a thing we take for granted and it is always slipping away, but in our youth we can squander it freely without thought. When I visit an old structure such as this fallen down church I get a sense of time and it's passing. At one time it was the pride and joy of a small community but now it is abandon and the people are gone. I look out over the empty land and there is not a home or a town for miles. I am curious how this church was build in this far off place. The advent of the railroads bought people and productive farms to remote areas of the Midwest Plains in the early 1900's. Small towns grew up quickly with the influx of people, but eventually most died out when the trains stopped running in the last couple of decades. So as I sit in these quiet places and listen to the squeaky door hinge as the wind blown against the door, I feel the sprit of the place and have a sense of the people from long ago.