From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 06/29/01-02:01:49 AM Z
Keith Gerling wrote:
>
(remember, there are two kinds of people in this
> world: people that separate people into two groups, and people that don't!).
I've always loved that joke. I'm one of the people who don't believe
that there are two kinds of people in this world. I'm also one of the
two people in this thread who talked about often starting with a sense
of an image and working toward bringing that image into reality, but
nothing Keith says about that way of working describes me or how I
work or think or approach a subject. My creative process is
right-brained, intuitive, holistic, nonlinear, nonsequential. It's not
about recording a visual scene accurately, in fact that is the last
thing I want to do. It's not even primarily about translating
light to the tonal scale of photographic materials, although eventually
of course that does have to be done in order to create a photographic
image. When I talked about "envisioning" or "previsualizing" (a very
poor choice of words if you're NOT talking about the zone system; I
apologize for that!) an image, I was talking about creative vision, in
other words not what the eye sees but what the mind imagines. As I
said, I often have a "sense" of an image early on in the process, but
that sense is usually so abstract as to be impossible to verbalize or to
picture in the mind as a photographic image. It's more an inner sense of
a quality or an essence of something that I want to communicate. The
whole task of the creative process is to find a way to embody that
sense, that quality, in an image. This is not to say I always manage to
do this successfully, only that this is how my creative process
operates and what I work toward as the goal.
I've enjoyed reading this thread; what has struck me is the diversity of
ways we think about and approach our work. It seems to me that we're
all ultimately after the same thing, even though we talk about it using
different language and approach it from different directions. In the end
whether we start from technique or from a concept or from some vague
"vision" or from a happy accident, the image is the goal for all of us,
we just get there by different paths. I liked what Gary said about
that.
Katharine Thayer
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