Today, I offer more correspondence—this time, to my Creative Concepts photographers, who have struggled to meet my high expectations all quarter. Lest they wonder why I push them so hard…

Dear Creative Concepts Class,

Hadi had mentioned in passing recently that often what he hears in conversation or when I am chatting with you all looks so much different when he has the opportunity to read it. So, listening to his thoughts and suspecting that is possibly the case for everyone… here are a few comments you might consider as you work on your projects. I’ll begin with a question for you: What if someone a hundred years from now in a museum somewhere came upon an image, a photograph, you created?

As you develop your projects and create your images, consider as the author Flannery O’Connor considered it. She declared that as a state for visual evidence, writing “is but a vision superimposed in fiction.” It was her belief that the aspects of grotesque were a current reality.

Her very words from an essay— ‘Some aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction’—expanded this ideal and reflected her feelings: ”I have found anything that comes from the South comes out of the South and is going to be called grotesque by readers, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

A viewpoint might imply the same imagination of philosopher, thinker, and writer Jean Baudrillard, as he suggested… “We are leaving reality behind us and entering a ‘hyperreality,’ where we must hide from the illusion we are afraid of.” Therefore, the subject will not be independent from the object—quite the contrary. They both influence each other, and it may even be the object that is actually manipulating the subject. Perhaps we fear to create? Why?

Maybe we fear being genuinely different. We remove actual physical differences, differences of handicap, intelligence and ethnic diversity. We replace them with a symbolism of ‘identity,’ i.e., an artificial identity–– based upon fake identities.

Baudrillard continued, “Doomed to our own image, our own identity, our own ‘look,’ and having become our own object of care, desire and suffering, we have grown indifferent to everything else. And secretly desperate at that indifference, and envious of every form of passion, originality or destiny. Any passion whatever is an affront to the general indifference.” This is what defines perhaps the outbreaks of intolerance that should not exist in enlightened societies.

Your images, if you give yourself permission to create, should foster an understanding that the simple distinction between animal and man—and between mere survival and civilization––is one that recognizes an ability to communicate as a fundamental value.

Any representation of the issues you choose becomes symbolic and contributes toward a vindication and, as well, an understanding that underlies a respect for human dignity and fundamental rights. Your interpretation should reflect observant viewpoints positioned sensitively with such imagination that a question provoked might have a nearly moral force to it.

Such an interpretation, i.e., the one you construct, is your question… it should combine intelligence, feeling, and perception to inform your work, to draw others into a shared narrative, and to make your experience a victory of the deepest feelings of curiosity, understanding, amusement, affection––and even sympathy.

As you look about, as you explore your questions, consider that you will find the solution to any problem within the problem itself.

Any creation of solutions from your work always comes from sorting through the consideration and selecting a most appropriate answer posed by an issue, i.e., how it might offer meaning. What might the possibilities or range of solutions be? It never is about which alternative you like, either, but the one that solves the problem. That is why to say ‘I like this’ or ‘I don’t like this’ is at best a lazy habit. To affirm integrity requires an analysis as to a definition of the problem. From such explorations can come the possibilities of viewpoints— YOURS!—which are contained only by the possibilities of your mind.

In these various assignments, you have an opportunity to look, to see by your expression, how powerful a message you can create from the collaboration of your work, and the opportunity to envision a power of what symbolism is. You will also see how this symbolism comes from appreciating and acknowledging how your core values not only respect but offer a sense of universal empathy for other peoples’ struggles for freedom.

Through your work you plant a seed that can grow to address all issues of indifference—large ones like injustice, racism, domestic violence, and religious intolerance, or even the smaller ones such as hospitality or charity.

And Nate, you are going to be doing an internship with Rodney Smith next quarter. Think!!! He went to Yale University to get his master’s degree in, of all subjects, THEOLOGY - a topic that has been a deep part of his entire adult life. “I guess I’ve always been very intense, but back then the intensity was sort of manifesting itself as anxiety,” Smith recalled in an interview. “Because of all this intensity I became really introspective and trying to figure out the cause and the purpose and the resolution to all that anxiety.”

It was while he was at Yale that Smith began a serious study of photo technique. He said, “I knew I wasn’t through studying theology but I really went there with the total intention of becoming a photographer… I absolutely knew I wanted to be a photographer, but I didn’t feel that… was the way to address the issues that were interesting to me, so I sort of entwined the two.”

Take a look…Rodney Smith —You tell me.

Learning how important the story is as a conduit to the ideals of truth and beauty is a way to understand why you would be a photographer to begin with, and a way to understand what your own purpose may become. Why would you get up and go to a studio in a morning; why you would get on a plane to fly halfway around the world to shoot this or that; why you would crawl into a helicopter and fly across the wilds of unknown lands to shoot a forest? As a photographer, you have a great opportunity to remove distance so that everyone can come together, so that we all sense the universality of understanding that we are the same, and realize we are one. You have the opportunity to connect humanity. If done in a best way, you can create a moment when an individual responds to his or her own humanity.

Modernism is characterized by its intent as a commitment to improve life through integrity of purpose. It is a search for the truth, and has the urgency of making the world better. It is at the core of what the projects in this class deal with. For as Henry Thoreau put it, “To affect the quality of the day is the highest of arts.”

The architect Philip Johnson, one of Modernism’s voices, defined his own creative philosophy: “Conflict is the father of all things.” All creation comes from conflict, and, within each story you create, that conflict must be relevant and noticed.

As you might look very closely, all these projects are a reaffirmation that understanding and appreciating a regard for ethical acceptance of the world and life is a responsibility, particularly a social responsibility, so the work you are and do, and can do… then remains as a relentless enthusiasm to keep the world safe for Democracy and this plan we have to create.

Seeking to understand and giving yourself an opportunity to find what a current reality might be is the only way you can get there. Approaching the issues as a bystander is not enough.

As I began this correspondence asking you about your work, I leave it offering you a suggestion from the imagination of the writer William Faulkner: “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means, and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”

So, where might the image you create on this day be in a hundred years?

Imagination comes from things that move you! What moves you?!

See you in the day. Hope your stories and your subsequent shoots are progressing and you are giving some solid thought to what it is you are really doing.

Hank.

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