Transition Analysis
And, you know it’s wild; I mean I live with change.
Change is the biggest part of our life.
—Pete Turner
Like almost everyone, I had always been under the impression that either you were born with creativity as a dominant trait or you were not, like athletic skills or a math gene. It never occurred to me that creativity has component parts that, when analyzed, provide a course of action to help us reach our own personal goals of self-expression. In the early 1990s, I had the good fortune of meeting a wise, somewhat irreverent, and extremely creative man, psychiatrist Dr. David Viscott. He taught me many things—some of which I will present later in this book—but one thing he impressed on me was the need to consciously study the creative process, especially as it related to my own personal growth. This self-study would eventually lead to a larger appreciation for the way ideas become manifested and how those manifestations become gifts for future generations.
Back then I had been in a creative funk for some time. I was making good money, but there was something missing from my life. There was a lack of fulfillment, which was becoming more burdensome. One day I was driving back from yet another ad agency meeting when I heard a promo on the car radio for one of Dr. Viscott’s weekend seminars. That ad stuck with me and I told my family about it when I got home. Apparently they sensed something was wrong with me as well, because they instantly agreed that I should look into attending the intensive three-day workshop on the topic of creativity that Dr. Viscott was going to deliver in Ojai, California. I was a little apprehensive when I signed up, but something told me it was the right thing to do.
When I first arrived at the workshop, I looked over the program and I quickly figured I would attend maybe a third of the lectures because I did not need, or wasn’t interested in, the rest of the presentations. There were topics such as: Finding your Passion, Overcoming Creative Blocks, Keeping the Energy Alive—you know, New Age jargon, psychobabble, for an audience of fluffy-headed devotees. The venue had a nice pool, and I thought I would be spending a good deal of the weekend working on my tan and thinking of possible movie scripts.
However, from the moment Dr. Viscott started talking that Friday afternoon I was mesmerized. Sitting in the audience of three hundred or so people, I felt he was talking to me and me alone. I was amazed at how receptive I was. A few times I had to stop from underlining whole paragraphs and putting asterisks all over my notes. Everything seemed so important. It was not the man that impressed me so much as it was the clarity of thought and the way the program itself evolved. Something happened that weekend, and it was nothing less than the crystal-clear realization that I had been going in the wrong direction. I had better start paying attention to my personal creative imperative or else be stuck with an unfulfilled, boredom-riddled life. It was on my drive back home, through the expansive orange groves and rolling hills between Ventura County and Los Angeles that I resolved to work toward the understanding of this elusive and empowering entity called “the creative process” as it applied to me.
From Tragedy to Community Outreach
A few years after that encounter, the Los Angeles riots of 1992 erupted. Dr. Viscott, a well-known Los Angeles radio talk-show host at the time, was accosted one evening during the riots and managed to fake a heart attack, causing his would-be assailants to run away without hurting him. The next night Dr. Viscott made an appeal on his radio program for the people of Los Angeles to come forward and start a grass-roots movement to help rebuild the city. Somehow I became the chair of the Arts Committee within our newly formed nonprofit organization, U.P., Inc. From that first meeting, we discovered there were three issues that needed the most attention and the ones we could actually do something about. They were education, housing and urban planning, and the arts.
I learned many things in my new role working with at-risk children. We developed free programs in photography, videography, music, writing, mural painting, and other artful ventures. Two things that intrigued me were 1) how the young people naturally gravitated towards art forms that allowed them to discover themselves, and 2) how the mentors got more out of each session than they thought they would. One of our first projects resulted in garden murals. The young people of Los Angeles painted two-miles worth of burned-out walls in the inner city. It was a wonderful thing to see artists from various disciplines work with children and to experience something creative coming forward to bring unity to our city. The programs ultimately helped hundreds of young people gain access to education and employment in the arts, and our efforts were rewarded with the knowledge that we made a positive difference.
Shortly thereafter, I began working as a creative consultant with mid-career professional artists who had lost their zeal for their work. I didn’t just become a creative consultant overnight. It was a long process where I would help one artist with his creative business problems, and that person would refer me to another, until I found a need existed in the marketplace for someone who understood the problems artists faced and could help them to deal effectively with those problems. Those challenges affected freelance photographers and staff photographers, assignment photographers and stock shooters, corporate and fine-art photographers, and filmmakers—all types of shooters who were having problems. They needed organization, advice, and a little motivation.
After a short consultation I would struggle to find a way to pinpoint what was most important to my client, and I would look back on my own experiences to define how to approach each case. Immediately I realized the need for an efficient method to cut through the distractions and the long, involved discussions of how cruel the world was and get to the heart of what was ailing my clients. Then I remembered Dr. Viscott saying that he listened closely to the voices of those who called into his radio program to determine which stage of pain they were experiencing, and then asked pointed questions to draw them out, to help them resolve their discontent. If they sounded angry, chances were that they were dealing with an unresolved pain in the past; and if they sounded anxious, they were probably anticipating a painful event in the future. That simple paradigm started me on a quest to define the stages creative people experience when they are confronting change and to figure out how I could use the definition of each stage as a starting point to help them find their way back to what was most important to them creatively.
Transition Analysis: Five Stages of Creative Evolution
Drawing on my experiences as a producer, an artists representative, a teacher at the Art Center College of Design, an administrator in a nonprofit arts organization, and a writer, I started to sink my energies into trying to understand the mysterious circumstances that allow us to revitalize our talents and reinvent our lives. In other words, I needed a way to analyze the transitions we experience and to explain the various stages we go through as we progress creatively. I needed to be able to identify at what point my clients had stalled out, and then help them get unstuck so they could move on. No small task, you might say, but one that has turned out to be very rewarding.
As I searched I decided to use Joseph Campbell’s five stages of the Hero’s Journey as a guide. Campbell’s first stage is the call to adventure. The hero becomes aware that something must be done to resolve a challenge. Second, the hero calls upon his mentors and allies to help him assess the danger and find the protection necessary to guard him during his quest. Third, he has to find ways to deal with the guardians of the treasure and formulate his plan of attack. Fourth, he has to put it all together, implement his well-thought-out plan, and deal with his challenge face to face. And finally, our hero triumphs as he brings back the treasure to the community, where the hero’s journey is validated and his valor is celebrated. The Hero’s Journey speaks metaphorically to the nature of meeting and overcoming challenges that universally reside deep within our subconscious.
The first thing that I needed was a visual representation, a simple design that would help me explain the conclusions. I needed a representation that would give order to random ideas and help me create a context that could be tested. To do this I envisioned an ellipse that started at the foot of an ascending spiral, because there is an undeniable evolutionary spiral effect that continually aspires to rise above itself, if you will, within the creative process. The process does not move backward. It may stall out from time to time, but it does not normally work in retrograde. Every piece of art you create, and which every other artist creates, adds to an immense existing body of work, and each contribution provides a platform for the next, constantly leveraging our comprehension, appreciation, and aspiration for a more inspired artful product.
At the starting point on that ellipse is the first stage, which is Recognition. The best way to describe Recognition is to imagine that you are blithely going along through life when something happens and your world is suddenly faced with a significant change. It could be good fortune or it could be a terrifying, overwhelming, catastrophic change—or just something so out of the ordinary that you do not know how to deal with it. It could even come in the form of a perceived uneasiness as you realize that you have fallen into the dread of mediocrity. I remembered attending a lecture delivered by the acclaimed poet Robert Bly titled, “The Horizontal Line and the Vertical Line in Art and Poetry.” In that lecture he drew a long horizontal line, which he said represented time, the time we spend doing ordinary things as we live out our everyday existence. But then circumstance, a vertical line, arbitrarily intersects that horizontal line, and that is the point at which all good art has its beginning. Why? Because the challenge of the new circumstance requires a new response, a resolution of equal or greater proportion—a response that allows us to get back to and continue on with our horizontal line existence. Or—and here is the good part—possibly the event lifts us to a higher plane of existence. He gave vivid examples of artists (Picasso and El Greco), writers, poets (Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain, and William Carlos Williams), and others whose most dramatic works were ignited by powerful events that changed their lives. That explosive intersection point, where circumstance disrupts our common ordinary everyday existence, I call the Recognition stage. At this point, Recognition alerts us that there is a challenge to our normal existence; something must be done if we are to proceed. If there is no Recognition, or worse, if there is denial and the call to action is ignored, then the subject is doomed to spirit-numbing mediocrity.
Transition Analysis: Five Stages of Creative Progress
Once we realize and accept there is a problem or challenge, we are compelled to move along the evolutionary cycle to the second stage, which is Assessment. Here’s where things get tricky. We have to be ready for an honest appraisal of what can realistically be done to bring about change, and what will allow us to create achievable goals. Yikes—that last sentence had a lot of emotionally charged concepts like honesty, reality, and achievable goals. However, there is no movement unless we can truthfully create goals that will help us grow, that are not totally out of reach. In Assessment we collect all the right tools, ask the experts and visionaries, do the research, get all the information together so our risk is calculated, not haphazard and foolhardy. “Calculated risk” need not be an oxymoron. It can be a motivation if executed with educated consideration. How many times have we stopped short of trying because we would have to confront something that seemed insurmountable? How many chances were lost because the excuses became the biggest obstacles? What would our lives be like if only we had taken the risk? The Assessment stage is all about honestly staring risk in the face and accepting the challenge.
But how do we effectively put into motion the decisions we have made once the Assessment phase is sincerely addressed? This is where the third stage, Planning, comes in. This phase lets you use your head. The Planning stage gives you empowerment because it has a large dose of a sense of purpose. Let me give you an example here. Almost seventeen years ago my home burned down. That was definitely a change in my status quo, a challenge to be dealt with. The fire was caused by a freak electrical accident, which the fire investigators for the city and the insurance company said could not have been avoided. My first reaction was anger that this traumatic event had happened to my family and me and that our already busy lives would become much more complicated. Into my busy days, already crowded with production issues, I had to squeeze in dealing with the insurance company, the bank, the dismantler, appraisers, restorers, the architect, and contractors. There were endless details to be gotten through before we could return to what I once called normal.
The anger was followed by a sense of helplessness and other classic symptoms of loss. The fire and its aftereffects were so disruptive that I had to work hard every day at not feeling so stranded by destiny that I would be immobilized. I would catch myself just staring out the window or boring my friends with my problems. I realized that the disaster had taken control of my world and I had to regain that control before I could get myself and my family’s life back together. I needed a plan to get that sense of control back. As a family we started with small steps to recovery. We gathered receipts and made lists for the insurance company, and we had family meetings to make sure everyone was being taken care of. Planning for little achievements allowed us all to feel as though we were getting back to having some sense of control.
That sense of control was empowering and gave us the energy to rebuild our home even better than it had been before. In the end our already close family became even closer. You don’t have to have your home burn down to come to this realization, but you do have to accept the fact that a good idea goes nowhere unless there is a structure around it that gives it form and provides a means for visualizing your unique goals. For my family, visualizing small steps and then creating larger, shared goals helped us to focus on what was important.
The fourth phase of creative transition is the hardest physically because it is the sweat-equity phase, which I call Implementation. This is where the hard work, the perseverance factor, comes in. You have to be committed to the execution of your strategic plan. You have to reserve the time to do it. It does not get done by itself. You still have to go out and shoot the picture, and process it, and do the postproduction on it, and edit it, and present it, and complete the body of work that eventually becomes the gallery show, or the annual report, or the coffee-table book, or the ad campaign, etc. This is what you live for, so it isn’t so much work as an opportunity, it’s a chance to finally show the world what you see, and how you see it. We are so fortunate. We get to do what most people only dream of. We capture images of life being lived. We define our reality, if only a fraction of a second of it at a time. Putting your plan into action is a verification of your sincerity as an artist. Implementation of your plan is your way of exercising your privilege, of sharing your gift, of progressing up the evolutionary spiral of creativity.
Transition Analysis: The Spiral of Creative Evolution
This leads us to the final fifth phase, which is Validation. The results of your creativity have a life of their own. They cannot be hidden in a box, or a drawer, or shoved under the bed. They must be shared! By shared I mean they could be hung on your wall, or shown at an art sale, or licensed for great sums of money, but they must somehow be seen. The showing of your work gives validation to the process, to your labors of love. Dorothea Lange could have hidden her photographs of migrant workers during the devastating days of the Dust Bowl, but we would not know of the hardships those people endured. Howard Bingham could have secreted away his images of Muhammad Ali, but then we would not have that unique eyewitness chronicle of America and its struggles through the latter part of the twentieth century. By allowing your work to be seen, both you and your viewers are given a new inspiration, and this provides the spark for new interpretations which lead to—you guessed it—the next Recognition phase for yourself and others, so the whole process can begin anew.
The process is self-perpetuating, but it must be tended to by each individual artist and by the artistic community in general. It must be entrusted to each generation and be robust enough to withstand the inevitable onslaughts, but it must be anticipated and nurtured.
It is important to note a very important subtext of this book. Indeed, it is the subtext of an actualized life: change is not only a part of the creative process, it is a requirement. Nothing moves up the evolutionary spiral without going through some change, some transformation. If we are static, if we do not take action, we cannot grow. Change seldom presents itself in a neat and ordered manner. Sometimes it appears as a good thing, sometimes as a terrible thing. Change is neither intrinsically good nor evil, but it exists nevertheless as an occasion we can measure our progress by. The real challenge is what we do with that change. We define ourselves by how we handle change, and Transition Analysis is a tool we can use to monitor that change. Transition Analysis is not an attempt to explain the creative process; rather it is a construct that helps us to understand how far we have come and how to anticipate change.
Essentially the only constant in life is change. In sometime subtle and sometimes dynamic ways, change rules our lives— our bodies change, the seasons change, and every moment brings with it the possibility that the next will not be the same. It could be better, it could be worse. We accept change but we do little to prepare for it, especially when it comes to how it affects our careers. I am amazed at how little thought people give to this essential act of living, how little attention we pay to how we transition between roles and how it affects our livelihoods and our lifestyles.
Transition Analysis lets us view a series of milestones and evaluate how far we have come in our own personal reinvention, and it also gives us a view of what to expect as we move from one stage to another. Recognition helps us acknowledge the need for change. Assessment does three things: 1) it gives us some talking points on how to honestly understand what we have going for ourselves; 2) it empowers us to seek advice; and 3) it helps us understand how we can use our skills to make the best choices. Planning gives us strategies on how to use our skills to their best advantage and how to set a course of action with alternatives—so we are not discouraged in case our first plan runs into problems. Implementation assists us and encourages us to stay with our plan and keep motivated. Validation gives us proof of how effectively we have dealt with change and encourages us to move on. And just so we do not become complacent, as soon as we have celebrated our accomplishments in the Validation phase, we are aware that we have to be vigilant to recognize that another round of self-examination is not too far off in the distance—in short, we are about to begin again.
In this book, which could also be called The Photographer’s Journey or The Artist’s Journey, we will look at how other photographers and artists have approached their own creative challenges and gone beyond mere survival. And because each of us is unique, it is interesting to see how each contributor has approached change differently, with his or her own “innovative problemsolving,”—sometimes overcoming great obstacles, always looking for a way to improve their circumstances. By using Transition Analysis as a method for recognizing the signposts along the way, we will study a framework for effective change. And here is a challenge I issue to you, the reader. While reading the comments and observations included in this book, see if you can identify with some of the situations and construct a meaningful outcome to your own story. It is the story you own, so take possession of it. Don’t wait for catastrophic events to awaken the possibilities within you. Be realistic, be preemptive. This is not a fantasy, but allow yourself to visualize the best possible scenario for your circumstances. Be aware and create the life you would really like to be living.
So, if you are ready for a little adventure in self-discovery, read on with an open mind and an open heart. Sometimes the journey will be smooth, sometimes it will be bumpy, so buckle up, hang on, and enjoy the ride.