To students at the Day of the Dead workshop, Oaxaca

We begin our creativity workshop in Oaxaca on October 24, and there are a few places left. Here is the letter I am sending to participants about how we will work.

I’ve just broken out of a whirlwind of activity to see that our workshop is only a few weeks off, and a wave of excitement has hit me. This wave always breaks just before a class, and it reminds me that I am heading out into a world that is more about possibilities than conclusions.  And the work of the workshops is to wade into these possibilities and manifest them as much as possible, not to analyze and control them.

 This is different than the way most of us come to function in the world, at least after the age of about 5. From birth to 5 we “play”, then we get serious and start school.

But if you think of the vast amount of growth we accomplish in those first 5 years, we must see that there are lessons for us in that play. There may be reasons begin focusing on outcomes at 5, but there are also reasons to resume playing at any point.

And that is a lot of what our workshop will be about.

You may be thinking Well, that sounds interesting, but what are we actually going to do? It is a fair question, and I want you to know that I have answers.

Of course, I’m not going to tell you what they are, because surprise is part of the way they work, but I’ll drop some hints.

To begin with, it might help to think of it as a creativity refresher class, more than a photography class, though we will be using photography throughout and will come home with new pictures. And since you have been creative from birth, you already have what you need to make them. You’e kind of like Moliere’s Bourgeois Gentleman who is delighted to discover he speaks Prose. Like this gentleman, you don’t have to learn the language of creativity, but you will begin to work with consciously and learn some new ways to get at it.

To do this, we will begin our time with a series of exercises that have very specific starting points and actions, so you will know where to begin day by day. They produce experiences in a sequence that is more stochastic than linear. What you will dour main task is to go at them with a lot of energy.

In general, we will be using exercises in areas other than photography to practice just seeing without regard to seeing pictures.  For these exercises we will set the camera aside so you can see that you see. Then we will pick the camera up again and carry whatever new seeing we have done into the photographic realm to allow it to work there. 

We will be doing this in the context of an unusual event, in a beautiful vibrant city. Sometimes such strong “subject matter” can actually interfere with our real art work, since the making of our art is about being fully present wherever we are. The danger is that we might be tempted to let a fascinating place do the lifting for us.  But I think we have time enough both to work internally with our creativity and to practice it in the world.

I have been doing this workshop---actually it is different every time—for many years. And many years ago both Enrique Cervera and Jonathan Safir were in it. So it is a particular pleasure to have them joining in the teaching and supporting of all of us. You might know one or the other of them, or you have read their bios, but in brief, Enrique is a photographer/artist/teacher in Mexico, and Jonathan is an artist/filmmaker/teacher who has been working on a film about the Day of the Dead in Oaxaca for 5 years. So these two are going to make this event special for all of us. They have done the setup, scouting and production, and have made wonderful connections in the museums and other venues in Oaxaca. And as co-teachers they will be stretching and supporting us each day.

One of the wonderful things about any workshop is that it suspends all the little micro-gravities of our lives—our jobs, our families, the obligations that preoccupy us—and lets us just float. Another big thing is that we get to work in concert with others so we can share responses, insights and strengths, something artists don’t really do that much. A third is that we get to explore other ways of being ourselves.

When I think about how this all  works, the model is more like laying out a string of dominos in some new direction, as opposed to laying up another course of bricks in the edifice of ourselves.

It sounds like fun and a little alarming at the same time…and it is. But you’ll be well supported in your work, and you’ll tend to find that the things you might be apprehensive about were never a problem at all.

A few practical matters:

The point is to generate pictures out of your experiences so that we can look at and learn from them. So you should certainly have a laptop to process and edit on.

You probably won’t need lights. Better to see the light that is there. A tripod might come in handy, though, in case there isn’t enough of it for hand-holding.

If you want to read a bit about how I approach things, I have a number of articles about the creative process on my website, mostly written for Communication Arts, along with some book introductions and graduation speeches.

So that’s if for just now. If you have any questions you can email me at sean@seankernan.com, Enrique at pix@lalux.com, or Jonathan at jonsafir@yahoo.com. We’ll answer as best we can.

Other than that, we’re all really looking forward to seeing you and working with you soon in Oaxaca. It will be good, hard work, serious and fun.

Further thought about Frank

One of the best things about the Frank show is the opportunity to look at contacts from the project and at prints that he ultimately rejected. Among these were images that I thought were fantastic. They were often quite graphic and very sensitive to qualities of light. Yet they didn't make the cut. The final series doesn't traffic much in light or in strong graphics. Maybe it is my background in theater...or my dramatic sensibility...but I would have picked any number of these.

So why didn't he?

It seems that Robert really tried to join the photo establishment of his day, tried to get work into Life, etc. And he kept getting rejected. In the end he was more or less left with no  choice but to wander off and do his own work, which seemed to be always pulling at him anyway.

And somewhere in the writings of the book Looking In he refers to a sense that, after years of trying, he is finally getting this elusive and un-nameable thing he was after into his photos.

I think that he was after something very subtle, impossible to describe or even concieve, especially before he had done it, and that perhaps he had to turn aside from graphics and effects to get to this finer thing. It was really hard, but he set off after something that was beyond words and also beyond any pictures that he had taken. He was after something that he did not even know was there.

There's a similar effort cited in the biography of Diane Arbus, in a quote from a diary where she talks about having worked for months and months to try to get at something she couldn't name or concieve of. And in this quote  she says something along the lines that she thinks, maybe, something of it might be creeping into her photos.

In both cases, this is playing at the highest level. And obviously it's a bit lonely out on the front edge of what you are doing, beyond experience and concepts. After one manifests whatever one was after, one can see that it was potentially there. Before that moment, there's no certainty, none at all. That's hard work.

At the opening of the Robert Frank show at the Met

(I want to get this experience down before I lose it or try to make it better.)

The opening of the Robert Frank show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last night provoked unexpected thoughts in me—and exhilarating ones. Openings are seldom the best opportunity to see work, but I knew hardly anyone at all there, so I was free to go down the walls slowly without having to stop and talk to people while trying to remember their names.

I’ve gone to other shows of work that moved me early on in my career, and it is often a bit of a let-down…not always, but  often enough. I've looked at the work of canonical figures and thought, Well...it's okaay..

But I didn’t think that would happen at this show. For one thing, the work has stayed so visible over time that there has been no gap in my awareness of it. For another, it landed on me really hard back then. In fact, as I went through the photos I felt that some were so in me that  it was as though I had taken them. That thought was so antic that I began to entertain it.

And that led me to shift back in time and remember just how the pictures had worked on me when I saw them first. At that time, around 1970, The Americans has passed through its confused first reception and was beginning to be seen as the radical and compelling entity that it was.

But what I remember is that when I first looked at the work I was seeing in it things that were very familiar. I could go out and take pictures of these things myself (and did). There were people everywhere like the people in Franks pictures. There was also grainy Tri-X film,  and of course there were Black and White.

Of course, that's just subject and materials. What I was really after then, whether I knew it or not (I didn't),  was not what was in Frank's awareness, but the awareness itself.

Imagine my excitement last night, as I moved through the show and was once again overtaken by that old sense of possibility that I could take pictures like that. Or like my own. That was what worked on me  when I first saw The Americans, and it came back last night.

There was much else to learn from those pictures and from Franks other work---the lyrical movement of the offhand composition, the sense of something about to happen just after the photo was taken. And in time there was the example he set of not getting enmired in what you had done, not if you wanted to keep moving on.

Jeff Rosenheim, who curated the current show, said that for him encountering the work was like encountering an old lover. For me it was more complex and a bit odder than that. It  was like encountering an old lover who hadn’t changed one bit, and beginning to think that perhaps I hadn’t either. Knowing, of course, that that would be absurd. Then thinking...but maybe not.

 

Two wonderful people.

Etting and Harriet Little Owl on the Crow reservation. Kind and proud,

Fantastic Poster for Muertos workshop

This is the poster for our Day-of-the-Dead. More about it here. workshop.

Scholarship application deadline coming up on Monday.