“I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.” —Saul Leiter

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.
—Patti Smith

Primrose Hill, December 2022

“All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice.” —Elliott Erwitt

and

“I am a craftsman. I often say that I am a photographer with a hobby, which is photography. Most of my images are commercial, but I also take pictures for my own pleasure. Sometimes the two go together, but not always.” —Elliott Erwitt

Attention and taking pleasure in the world — the two key ingredients for insightful, humanistic photography.

Jubilee Pool, Penzance, September 2023

Going Critical

Going Critical — Melting Asphalt

I’ve had this essay stashed in my to read pile for ages and it was totally worth the wait. It explains the concept of ‘diffusion’ in networks using concision, clarity and interactive demos. Better yet, you can tweak the parameters of the demoes live to get an intuitive grasp of how, for example, transmission rates affects critical thresholds. Reading this and playing with the demos has given me a much better understanding of how memes, infectious disease, knowledge and culture spread through networks. The end of the piece, which focusses on how cities / density are powerful both for positive (scenius, cultural transformation and intellectual breakthroughs) and negative (infectious disease, shitty social phenomena) reasons was particularly interesting. One to read on a desktop, not mobile.

“You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not. How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love.”
—Anthony de Mello

Action Bias or "Do Something"

Back in the day, famed Broadway director Gower Champion was directing a musical. With time pressure mounting, he entered the theatre during a rehearsal and was alarmed to see the cast just standing around on stage. The choreographer was just sitting there, in the second row of the audience, his head in his hands.

The director asked, “What’s going on?”

“I just don’t know what to do next,” the choreographer lamented.

The director blinked. “Well, do something, so we can change it!”

I enjoyed this story from Do Something, So We Can Change It!, Allen Pike’s post about tackling ‘two-way’ decisions proactively. If a decision is reversible, it’s better to make your choice quickly, and refine from there. You can undo a mistake if needed, and if you are quicker to take action, you’ll receive feedback faster. Then you can tweak your approach based on how it performs in the real world, rather than ruminating about various options and their ever-branching outcomes.

As someone who is prone to analysis paralysis, I’m working to cultivate a bias to action. I‘ve chosen better defaults to help make simple decisions quicker, and I’m prioritising starting over theorising, shipping over finessing.

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”

—Annie Dillard from The Writing Life

via Austin Kleon

They work as if this were the natural thing to do; they create as if this were the natural thing to do; they give birth to beauty as if this were the natural thing to do. They have entered the way of salvation through unconscious faith. It is a path open to all. And once they have entered this path, the creation of plain, natural beauty becomes a thing of ease, a matter of course. This natural, unforced beauty is the result of a kind of unconscious grace. This grace is a special privilege of craftsmen and leads them to a realm of blessed unawareness. Without consciously thinking whether something is good or bad, creating as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, making things that are plain and simple but marvellous, this is the state of mind in which artisans do their finest work.

—from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi (emphasis mine)

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

by Wendell Berry

…in design (of websites, or home decor, or clothing) having the most sophisticated of everything usually leads to poor results. Elegance is frigid.

Good taste in these involves the right measure of unsophistication. Less exactitude is more joyous, less neurotic, but still refined.

— Simon Sarris

This neatly sums up my feelings about the work of my favourite artists, writers, musicians and photographers.

Enough order to arrest the eye or ear. Enough chaos to feed the heart and mind.

A Fresh Coat of Moss

You should embrace the visceral quality in reading. Read mostly fiction. Read slowly. There is a kind of marinating that happens with very good works, they are always more than their story. The goal is not to digest information, but to layer over your reality with a fresh coat of moss. Your own world becomes colored by these stories, so it is worthwhile to spend time seeking the excellent works from across cultures and history.

You should have a goal, in some sense, to be influenced by the works that you read. All stories influence you, regardless of how they get to you. A person who reads no great stories will be influenced by the few stories he does come across in life, for better or worse — and I think mostly worse.

—Simon Sarris, from Reading Well

When [a man] puts a thing on a pedestal and calls it beautiful, he demands the same delight from others. He judges not merely for himself, but for all men, and then speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things. Thus he says that the thing is beautiful; and it is not as if he counts on others agreeing with him in his judgment of liking owing to his having found them in such agreement on a number of occasions, but he demands this agreement of them. He blames them if they judge differently, and denies them taste, which he still requires of them as something they ought to have; and to this extent it is not open to men to say: Every one has his own taste. —Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 1790

via the excellent Futility Closet blog by Greg Ross

Complicated vs Complex

Recently, I heard Arthur C Brooks discuss the difference between complicated and complex problems on an episode of the Tim Ferriss Show and it made me think about how that distinction applies to art.

Complicated problems seem difficult when first encountered, but are easy enough to crunch with enough compute. It might take a while, but if you work through the process from beginning to end, you’ll get the answer.

Complex problems often start with simple questions — who will win this football match and how? — but the correct answer, if it even exists, is unknowable. Too many moving parts. Too many unknowns. Too much randomness.

Of course, complex problems are more interesting and important to contemplate:

• why are we here?
• how can I live a good life?
• who do I want to spend it with?

I think this applies to art too. Art that asks more questions than it answers endures, both in the mind and in the canon.

The complexity inherent in good art shouldn’t be confused for complication. The key is work that is dense with meaning and mystery; not necessarily dense pictorially, musically and linguistically. It can be simple, but not shallow. I’m thinking of artists like Agnes Martin, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Basho who draw power from a minimal approach.

I want to make photographs which share the qualities of the work I admire: pictures that get better over time, that contain details missed on first glance, that leave you with a feeling that you can’t shake. I’m seeking complexity.

Democratically elected governments can to some degree adapt to spatially extended responsibility, because our communications technologies link people who cannot meet face-to-face. But the chasm of time is far more difficult to overcome, and indeed our governments (democratic or otherwise) are all structured in such a way that the whole of their attention goes to the demands of the present, with scarcely a thought to be spared for the future. For [Hans] Jonas, one of the questions we must face is this:

“What force shall represent the future in the present?”

from Tending the Digital Commons by Alan Jacobs