Bird by bird has one of
biggest lies in history. It is crazy to think that this book is used in an
educational environment. I think that there are or should be charges filed
against the author. Everyone knows that strawberry jam is the best way to make
a PB&J, not GRAPE! Get it right! Now that that's out of the way, we can move on.
I like how the
school lunch chapter discussed something that is very familiar to millions of
people and used it in an illustrative way for the writing process. Actually, it
really fits into any creative process. Writing seems to be the best way to get
an analogy to fit with something else. Most people learn to write before they
learn to photograph, draw seriously, create music etc. Since we start with
writing it is something that is more familiar to more people. Once something is
related to writing, it can then be related to other fields.
The
Polaroid chapter took a dark turn for me. I really enjoyed the concept of a
Polaroid developing in phases. It isn't visible all at once. It seems as if
someone is adding to a painting one layer at a time. The author described the
child against the fence, then family appearing, and then the baboons with
lashing teeth. It made me think of how we often see people and think we know
their story or what their story will be and sometimes we pass on someone
because we don't think it is worth our time or it isn't interesting enough. It
really made me brought me down for a little bit. Maybe it was a combination of
the music that was playing while I was reading the chapter. I don't know.
Whatever the cause or combination of causes was, it really got me thinking. It
made me think of a quote that I heard years ago. I don't know why it made me
think of this, and I am not sure if it even applies, but here it is.
“Wanna
make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable — your
weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers — and pretend they’re across
the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are
afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are
afraid of themselves.”
-
Richard Siken
It
also made me think of this one as well.
“The
Edge...There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really
know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are
those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and
then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time
to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still out there.”
-
Hunter S. Thompson
The
chapter in On Being a Photographer about selecting a subject had
one point that really caught my attention. I am not sure if it was the intent
of the authors to have such an emphasis this, but it was like a flashing light
to me. In the chapter, they stated that the study of the history of
photographer is really about subjects. This applies to other mediums besides
photography as well. But, when we are talking about photographers, we define
their abilities of how they covered X or how they photographed Y. It is an
interesting way to analyze a person - by discussing their work. It happens
everyday and in almost every facet of life, but do we ever really think about
it. It links back to a line in the Tao of Photography. It talked about
someone becoming what they photograph. In a sense, becoming inseparable from
their work. If someone speaks ill of their work, it is taken as an insult to
their character.
Another
part of the chapter that I liked was how they discussed people asking them to
"give specific advice on the choice of subject matter." What I took
from this was that we, as photographers and also just as human beings, should
start looking at subjects not as a noun, but as a verb. Stay with me on this.
All too often, we look at subjects as objects. They can be people or places,
but they are still a thing; something that is tangible. However, after
reflecting on this chapter, I feel that we, or at least I, should start looking
at what we photograph as different experiences. Now this could still fall into
that noun realm, but it's all in the mindset going in. The transitive verb form
of "subject" is "to expose or render vulnerable." This
shouldn't be looked at as being a negative. The photographer should have
themselves in their work so they can learn and grow from each experience.
(Obviously with regard to ethical considerations).
"Now I want to
propose another idea all together... The real you, is not a puppet which life
pushes around. The real you, the real deep down you, is the whole universe. You
cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin. Your skin doesn't
separate you from the world, it's a bridge. But just as a magnet polarizes
its-self in north and south but its all one magnet, so experience polarizes
itself as "Self" and "Other", but it's all one. What
you call the "External world" is as much YOU as your own body. Most
people think that when they open they're eyes and look around that what they
are seeing is outside... it seems, doesn't it, that you are behind your
eyes. We haven't realized that life and death, black and white, good
and evil, being and non-being, come from the same center. When you look
for your own particularized center of being which is separate from
everything else, you wont be able to find it. The only way you'll know it isn't
there is if you look hard enough, to find out that it isn't there. It isn't
there at all, there isn't a separate you. There are, in physical reality,
no such things as separate events. People can't be talked out of
illusions. If a person believes that the earth is flat, you can't talk him
out of that, he knows that it's flat. He'll go down to the window and see that
its obvious, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him that it isn't
is to say, "Well let's go and find the edge."
- Nothing More "Pyre" Excerpts from lectures by Alan Watts
