Allowing myself discovery instead of perfection
I have been using a camera since I was in high school. But my ability to remember photography technique and specifics is highly limited. I am not capable of reading manuals and understanding them well. I am not capable of reading any instructions and figuring them out with my hands. My brain cannot translate words into action often. This is a processing issue I know now, but for most of my life I have just felt supremely incapable of learning many things. I took classes to learn how to use my camera and photoshop but no matter how many times I was told the information or read it, my brain will not retain it. I always forget the steps. I always forget which editing tool does what. I always forget the methods to use technology so that it makes things easier and thus technology often makes my life much harder and causes me problems. I am a tactile learner and computer programs are not tactile for me. They are not intuitive for my hands unless I intuit my way through the tools and options without regard to how they are “supposed” to be used. My brain requires me to “discover” everything I learn and remember, it rejects teaching.
I figured out how to use the masking tool in Lightroom this year after a decade of trying. My brain has finally, finally, absorbed the knowledge because it wanted to achieve something specific and needed the skill. Prior, it was just a thing to learn but was not “needed.” I’m coming to understand my brain has very strong ideas about what is worthwhile information and what is not. If a skill is not perceived as necessary, my brain will only attend to the learning of it in a passive way. It will fill the cup, but not drink the knowledge so to speak. I am not often in control of what my brain does decide to learn, focus on, remember, recall, or think about. I am simply an aware passenger, making suggestions that seem to be largely ignored.
This means that a lot of the work I make is me following impulses and reacting in the moment to a spark that then carries me forward to action. I have stopped trying to really be the director because I found that when I do so, my work is not as good. It’s self conscious and too purposeful, too concerned with saying one thing that it ignores too much. I have learned instead to play the role of producer. I make sure my brain has everything it needs to work well and I see to it that I have enough capacity and time to work with, and then I let go. I trust my brain as its own director to create. This may seem odd for some, to separate yourself from your thinking in this way, but this has always been the way with me because for as long as I can remember I have known that I am not truly in control, but that I operate as a set of responses, with a core processing code I am wired to follow. Now I understand how I am wired, and I am no longer trying to spend time inefficiently controlling things, my brain as sort of expanded the last two years and is computing at a level it never has before.
This expansion and self acceptance has led me to a lot of new conclusions about the world and how I want to proceed. Ultimately, I think I’ve become quite radical and I’m trying to reconcile my radical ideas with the life I actually live. I’ve included two images today, both required the masking tool in Lightroom, which I recently internalized. They were printed yesterday and represent an attempt to further intervene on a landscape that felt more magical than it looked. I am always trying to make things that bring to the surface my inner world which is far richer than the one most people experience. My technique is nowhere near perfect, but that’s always part of the point of my work.