Personal Knowledge
How do you adapt yourself to change?
You have to constantly be living it, questioning it,
asking yourself, what is interesting to explore?
—Douglas Kirkland
So far you have recognized that a challenge exists, created a timeline to visualize and take stock of your personal history, and rediscovered your passion. These are the first steps of Assessment. That was followed by another element of Assessment—education—in which you considered how successful photographers have learned to reeducate themselves when they were faced with challenges to their creative expression.
By getting an overall picture of your past accomplishments, and seeing how others have successfully dealt with similar issues, you now can start to see patterns of your own behavior emerge that highlight the choices you have made and how you have reacted to them. It’s not just the choices themselves but also the reasons why you made, or didn’t make, those choices in the first place that expose the most revealing answers. For example, you can now ask yourself some important questions that will take you deeper into your self assessment: What has been your main motivation for making changes? What are your creative strengths and weaknesses? Have you come to a point where you feel creatively burned out, and what can be done about it? These are just some of the interesting questions that leap out once you open up the treasure chest of personal knowledge. Let’s start out by asking the most basic of all questions, which is, what do you really care about?
Your Personal Vision Statement
To start off with, it is important to define what is most important to you and how that works into your career choice. In other words, what is your personal Vision Statement? By that I mean, what is it that you aspire to? When you start your day, what do you dedicate yourself to, or do you just jump out of bed and charge ahead? Do you want to contribute to world peace? Do you want to end world hunger? Do you want to have the world’s largest collection of Manolo Blahnik and Dolce & Gabbana shoes? What is it that motivates you? And, very importantly, does that motivation have anything to do with your creativity and how you express it?
You may remember that I mentioned in an earlier chapter that a question I sometimes ask my clients to answer is, what would you create with your art if you won the lottery? Notice I did not say, what would you do if you won the lottery? I asked that once and a client said he would jump in a boat and sail away. He didn’t even bring up the topic of how he would enhance his creativity—he just wanted to get away. He had bigger issues than I was capable of helping him with. Now I ask each client what he would create if he won the lottery, and together we try to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible. So let me ask you, what are you passionate about?
Passion gives us power. It is made up of vision and energy. It also gives us the justification to strike out on our own and explore uncharted territory. It gives us the courage to challenge convention and open up opportunities for ourselves and others. A vision statement has a personal component (“I want”) and a goal component (“to make people confront the human condition” or what ever you feel is worthy of your talent). Vision statements challenge us to reach outside of ourselves. They are the first step in a checklist of factors that will take us outside of our comfort zone and, in so doing, will give us a peek into what we are capable of doing. Essentially, you must first have a vision, and then you have to start figuring out what steps you will need to reach your goal.
Your Personal Mission Statement
That is where the next step, the Mission Statement, comes in. The Mission Statement lays out how we intend to achieve our Vision Statement. “I want to make people confront the human condition by using my camera to capture the face of poverty.” The Mission Statement gives us the authority to bring together core values with our talents. A well-formed Mission Statement infuses a goal orientation into your every action because you now have a sense that you are working on a cause and nothing can stand in your way.
Now you have taken two small but important steps on a journey of thousands of miles, or years, and a myriad of experiences captured on hundreds of rolls of film, or digital media. It all starts with a few words that keep rolling around in your head, and you can’t rest until you fill in the blanks. The key to the Vision and Mission statements is that they have to appear to be just a little bit out of reach, but attainable the more organization and effort you put into them. Corporations are famous for having lofty sounding but corny Vision and Mission statements. They then fall short of their goals because they try to be all things to all people for all the wrong reasons. But personal statements of vision and mission have to be concise and meaningful.
You are well served to start out each day saying your Vision and Mission statements out loud, so you can hear them and you can form the words clearly. You can write them on a card, slip them into your pocket, and glance at them throughout the day so you can stay focused on what is important. Before long your eyes will see things that relate to them, your ears will pick out words and sounds that connect with them, you will find people who have the same interests, and you will become aware of them in places you never noticed before.
Creative Strengths and Weaknesses
Once you have a focus in mind you will want to concentrate your energies on what is necessary to achieve your goals. You don’t want to spend all this precious energy doing things that will sap your vigor. What are you good at? What are you not so good at? The best way to do this is to start out by asking: what are my creative strengths and weaknesses?
When I ask this question of my clients, it is usually relatively easy for them to come up with their creative strengths; the weaknesses are a little harder to discover. On a personal note, when I was first confronted with this question, I answered that I was known for being a pretty good communicator. Hooray for me. But when I dug around for a weakness, I found that my weakness was actually a mirror image of my strength. The fact of the matter is I hate to be misunderstood, so I go to great lengths to make myself clear. Unfortunately, sometimes I overdo my explanations and end up confusing people. Does that make sense? These two personal qualities are actually tied together in a convoluted way, a symbiotic way, feeding off of each other and keeping both alive. At first I thought this insight was a little perverse, but then I realized that many of our strengths and weaknesses are correlated. It is nothing to be ashamed of, and there is something empowering once you accept the fact and learn how to use it to your advantage.
Here are a few more examples. See if you can relate to any of them:
1 · Strength: organized. Weakness: micromanagement. Some people think you are very organized, because when you do a job you have everything buttoned up and ready to go with backup in case anything goes wrong. The reality is that you hate to have anything go wrong on a shoot. You need a Plan B—backup pieces of equipment, an alternative location, or whatever. You live in fear that you would get caught not anticipating a problem, so you overcompensate, or micromanage, and have as many contingency plans as the budget will allow.
2 · Strength: perfectionist. Weakness: perfectionist. We can all relate to this one. You work your tail-end off striving for perfection in your artwork because that’s the way you were taught, and anything less than perfection is not your best effort. You toil away noodling the props, or chasing reflections, or getting the right angle and light, or (here’s my favorite) fixing it in postproduction, only to find you are running out of time (or light, or disk space, or budget, etc.) and you have to settle for something less than perfect.
I hate it when that happens. So you realize that being perfect is not all it’s cracked up to be, and you have to recalibrate your idea of what can actually be done.
3 · Strength: no fear. Weakness: no fear. You accept every job that comes your way with no thought of failure. This “Bring it on!” attitude is envied by those who do not have it; no obstacle is too great and no challenge is left unaccepted. Of course, the downside is that sometimes you get in over your head and you end up spending more time and money trying to make everything right, when a little calculated caution in the beginning could have saved a lot of grief.
I’ve known many an entrepreneur who had this way of doing business, and they were either considered great visionaries or great failures.
4 · Strength: Experience, knowledge, and time invested. Weakness: Too much experience, outdated skills, and past your prime. Ouch. This one’s for the mid-career folk. You, the over-qualified worker, find yourself in an employment no-man’s land, when instead you should be sought after for the wealth of knowledge you bring with you. The new technologies have brought us seemingly unlimited resources for knowledge, but they have failed miserably to bring the wisdom concerning how to use that knowledge effectively. There is no substitute for experience, but a lot of clients and employers are not willing to pay the price. Which is wrongheaded, when you think of it, because the older worker has the wisdom to control costs and work around problems.
No doubt you can see something of yourself in some or all of these cases. Knowing your own creative strengths and weaknesses is an important step in appreciating the extremes and understanding how far you are willing to put yourself on the line.
The obvious outcome of knowing our creative strengths and weaknesses is that, once we have identified them, we can either educate ourselves to overcome the weaknesses, or we can look for people who can help us make up for our deficiencies. But we have to be very careful here and not become complacent, expecting that the person or persons we hire to make up for our creative weaknesses are the answer to all our ills. They may just add another layer of complication if their vision and our vision are not compatible.
Compatibility of vision and shared agendas all depend on shared goals. When the stress caused by conflicting goals reaches a certain point, we get distracted from our passion. For whatever reasons, we find we are spending more time taking care of things other than our passion. We lose time, then energy, then the will to attend to our form of expression. The downward portion of the cycle begins. We are headed to that dreaded Valley of Despair again, where we are tired of it all. There is even a name for it—we say we are “burned out.”
I have given a considerable amount of thought to the phenomenon of being “burnedout.” Burn-out manifests itself in a multitude of ways. It may occur when we become frustrated because we cannot create. Burn-out may occur when we have been repeating the same act over and over again and it offers no challenge to our psyches. Once we fall into burn-out’s clutches, we feel we will never be able to unleash ourselves from its grip. There is a physical component (you have to be healthy to climb out of it), a psychological component (you have to get your mind in a positive framework to overcome it), and a metaphysical component (you have to have a high sense of duty necessary to snap yourself out of the doldrums). In my interviews with successful photographers I saw glimpses of these physical, psychological, and metaphysical aspects of creative burn-out in their responses, which were as diverse as their personalities:
Eric Meola was direct in his response: “Sink or swim. Just do it.”
Jay Maisel, as usual, had this straight-ahead advice: “I hear that a lot, and I just think you need to get rid of all the bullshit around it and get back to the basics of photography. Just go out and take some pictures without having somebody telling you what to do. Go out and take pictures of what interests you rather than what makes money for you. And if you are still burnt out after that, then maybe you shouldn’t be in this business.”
Pete McArthur’s response because it was just like him—candid, self-deprecating, and funny: “Take a class or just grow up, quit whining, and shoot something like you would have done twenty years ago. This goes for me too.”
Pete Turner had this to offer, based on his own experiences, in which each opportunity has the potential of leading to another option you may not have initially considered. When Pete started to feel burned out, he would remember the stamp collection, and how the brightly colored stamps spoke to him about the exciting world out there: “I’d say, I’ve had enough studio shooting or commercial stuff. I’m going to go off some place on my own and just shoot to clear my head out. Interestingly enough, some of my better pictures were made on trips like that where you just go and follow your instincts completely.”
Douglas Kirkland gave this advice based on how he handles the subject: “Explore the latest technology. What I do is the following; I keep looking at pictures all the time, everywhere. I keep trying to extract from them. I don’t want to copy them but I want to get some nourishment from them. And I keep getting input from them all the time and occasionally I see something I really like, and I say, ’I wish I’d done that picture myself. That is really cool.’ Now, what can I learn from that? What elements are there in this that I could use? Again, this is not copying; this is just nourishment and understanding. Correspondingly, you see something really bad, that’s really been messed up, and you say, ‘What did they do so wrong?’ It’s all part of the process of continuing to learn.”
I believe that we all internally know what we have to do, but sometimes we need the support of those we trust to help us along. Barbara Bordnick touched on the importance of relying on the honesty of friends: “I was very burnt out and unhappy until that model didn’t show up. [See anecdote in chapter 3.] My friend, Sarah Moon, advised me to just take one photograph everyday and not worry about what it is. Just shoot everyday. It was great advice.”
Bob Krist had this great insight to offer based on a recent experience: “I can only say, try something different. Believe it or not, you get burned out no matter what you are doing. I don’t like to say this out loud because it sounds so ungrateful, but I was in Italy for six weeks shooting a big stock thing, and I was just trying to get a handle on shooting in Rome. I called my wife and said, ‘I’m burned out on travel. I can’t do this any more. I just don’t want to do it any more.’ And she kind of talked me down off the ledge. You can get burned out on anything. Too much chocolate cake and you’ll get burned out on chocolate cake.”
Bob Kirst: TelCenter
Bob Krist: Pipeman
When I posed the question about creative burn-out to CLIO and Ace Award winning travel/documentary photographer Mark Edward Harris he reflected on himself and other photographers giving us a glimpse as to how common the problem is. Mark has traveled the world producing remarkable photography and film as well as publishing three books, Faces of the Twentieth Century: Master Photographers and Their Work, The Way of the Japanese Bath, and Mark Edward Harris: Wanderlust. He offered this unique perspective:
What an incredible statement: “a caricature of myself.” That is probably the most comprehensive phrase I have heard on the topic of what it feels like to experience creative burn-out. You don’t even feel you are yourself. You are standing outside of yourself. You are acting the way others expect you to act, but in a way that makes you uncomfortable in your own skin. You are not your own self.
If you are not being yourself, then you need to find that self that is you again. Phil Marco had this straightforward answer: “Sometimes it’s a matter of just getting away from it all. Maybe go to galleries and do nothing, but observe. Put everything aside and let your mind become a blotter, and then just give it a rest. Literally take a break. Sometimes you have to get out of what you are doing in order to come back in with a fresh point of view.”
Ken Merfeld offered this deeply considered response: “I think all photographers need to build in a little bit of a preventative balance within themselves so that doesn’t happen. I believe that a photographer has to have a release within their medium other than just the type of work they are earning a living from. Whether it’s picking up a toy camera or walking around weekends shooting snapshots with a point-and-shoot, or using a pinhole camera, or just playing with your art instead of always having the pressure attached to it. We all began as photographers because we loved the process of image-making. We loved the surprises. We loved the magic. That gets bled out because of all the pressures, and because of the deadlines, and because of the competition. That’s why people get stressed out and lose their love for the medium. So if you have a way that you can protect that love of the medium, you can survive.”
Ryszard Horowitz’s thoughts reflect his philosophy but goes well beyond it: “Well, the concept of being ‘burned out’ is hard for me to identify with. I understand it very clearly, and as I mentioned before, most of my friends burned out or moved on to other things. But if you really have passion for photography, and you really do it because you love it, how can it burn you out? You can be burned out by a nasty client, or by circumstances, but not by photography as such. Of course we all go through stages when we stumble—nothing comes out and there are only difficulties, and nothing works—but that is something that we have to overcome. It’s hard for me to make too much sense out of it, except that if somebody feels burned out, take off, change the environment, go to the other side of the world, do something else for a while and then go back. I love moving myself away from it. I have a place in upstate New York in the woods where I can totally escape the madness of business. Also, I love to travel, I love to meet people in different parts of the world and show my work, look at their work. I love meeting with young people, it’s like a two-way street: I learn from them, they learn from me. I see their enthusiasm, sometimes I see their talent, sometimes I see no talent, but it’s very exciting because you see yourself in the past. Watch your own children kind of growing. Relive your life and see how they stumble, or they don’t.”
Jerry Uelsmann revealed how his perspective on invoking the creative process has mellowed over time: “Everybody has to deal with that individually. A lot of people ask me about ‘blocking’ and all that. We all have blocking systems, but as you get older you learn to cope with that and I basically work through them. It’s like we have this twenty minutes to talk [during the interview], let’s just be profound. You can’t do that. You can’t say I am going into the darkroom to make these wonderful images, but at least I try to create conditions that are conducive for things to happen.”
David Fahey gave a practical response as to how those in the world of fine art photography might deal with creative burn-out:
So there it is. Being “burned out” from time to time is a common enough occurrence. It happens periodically and apparently to almost everybody. It may even be a key ingredient in helping us recognize that we have to make a change; a warning shot that we need to do some self-assessment. It involves the body, the brain, and the spirit, all of which need to take a break occasionally to relax, to rejuvenate, to reinvent themselves as well. There is a story that Einstein was daydreaming at his job as a patent-office clerk when he came up with his general relativity theory.
Of course some people may claim they are suffering from chronic creative burn out, but I suspect they are only covering their lack of motivation in fancy terminology. For those living in that exotic region of denial there is no hope, no energy big enough to move them to the next step. I have met a few people who have never gotten past the “what if” hurdle. I am sure you have too. Thank goodness you are not one of them. The fact you are reading this book is proof that you are willing to ask the necessary questions that will help you take control of your future. So what holds us back? What diminishes our abilities to accept the possibilities? One obstacle is obvious, but it can also be obscured by misperceptions. Many times that barrier is risk. The next chapter will allow us to consider risk and how to gain control over its power.
