Slowing down, allowing things to be absorbed, understood and felt.

 

Mirror

Slowing down, allowing things to be absorbed, understood and felt.

I mentioned in my last blog that one of the surprising and unexpected things about being on this course is that it is forcing me to slow down.  Which is a good thing, I think.  Not ideal to try to run before you can walk but something I am prone to try and do.  By noticing that I was rushing through the exercises and making mistakes I have resolved that I must take a breath and stop trying so hard to reach some indeterminate goal. 

This has had a knock on effect and I feel under less pressure to promote the commercial work I have begun to do – although I do not think I should give up promoting, just that I don’t need to charge at it, marketing as aggressively as I dare (which probably isn’t very much at all) but instead allow it to unfold gradually and build at a pace that is sustainable and fits in with my life as a mother of very young children. 

It also means I feel less crazed about making sure I get this course done as fast as possible – I don’t mean to leave it to the last minute or to dismiss it but instead to get as much out of it as I can, given the restrictions and limitations of my existence. 

And the biggest paradox about slowing down is that one of the reasons (and there are a few) I was drawn to do this course was because I wanted/needed to try and push some very painful emotions away, to fill my head and life with activities and thoughts in order to avoid facing hurt.  

So there has been this conundrum: I want to express myself through photography.  One of the things to express surely is the enormous sense of rage, fury, distress, hurt along with whatever else emerges as time passes – I don’t want to bang on endlessly about one thing at all but this is what is in me at the moment.  I do hope to do it in a way that is cathartic and helpful rather than self-abusive and destructive.  And I hope photography will allow me to do that.  But, whatever else is true, I cannot find a voice to do any of this if I’m running too fast in order to avoid actually feeling any of it.  It’s hard.  It’s extremely hard.  But my adult-long ‘project’ has been to find some authenticity which has not always been easy and it would be a shame to give up on that at now.  I have to feel this stuff in order to express it.

Knowing and understanding how that all actually unfolds isn’t straightforward and I don’t think it would help me to try and be prescriptive.  I cannot and do not want to unveil the intimate details of what I have experienced these last two years.  I’m not interested in revealing titillating facts or bashing other human beings.  But I do want and need to somehow ‘vocalize’ what’s inside me.  And maybe even to scream about how very disturbed some accepted and ubiquitous aspects of our society seem to me.

********

Slowing down has given me time to think, perhaps.  It is an unfamiliar way of being and one that I hope to learn and become more accustomed too. I have been thinking about one of the articles I read in the copy of Uncertain States another student kindly sent me.

Agatha A Nitecka (AN) is a portrait artist/photographer who comes from a psychoanalytic background who states in her article that she has always been concerned by the intimate and how it is shared, I was immediately drawn to her photographic work and to her accompanying words.

I was intrigued by her statement about how a photographer and subject should ideally be actively engaged in order to create something artistic rather than a mere likeness which would be valid as a record but not terribly interesting thereafter.  I would say I prefer to avoid ten-minute sessions with any subject if I can (although I sometimes work for an event company where I am required to do just that and the challenge is to be as authentically engaged as possible in that brief time), to become involved, to share a moment with the people I photograph and to allow that shared moment to inform the result – the photograph.  But I have been looking at things slightly differently to AN, and I wonder if I have been undervaluing my presence in the whole scenario - and not only whilst taking photographs.

AN says ‘if the photographer tinted the photograph with their presence and captured the togetherness of the encounter – then the viewer can participate in the experience shared and hopefully feel a similar flutter of emotion.’  I feel I have been imagining that one of the reasons that several people have said my photographs of people are full of character and that’s what they like about them is because I am so adept at allowing myself to disappear, and therefore allowing the subject to emerge as fully as possible.  I now question this – do I actually allow myself to disappear?  Has my tendency towards ‘co-dependency’ meant somehow I become absorbed by the Other while working?  Am I wrong to think this is actually what happens?  Or do I simply engage with the subject just enough to enable her to emerge? Because let’s face, it if I were not engaged then the subject wouldn’t be engaged and there would be no photograph full of personality.  So maybe I am fully engaged as a defined individual but could afford possibly to be more engaged? I don’t know the answers.

This has given me a lot consider – I never give very much direction.  I chat.  And I ask the subject to chat back.  Not always but that’s been my way of working – friendly, unassuming, deliberately not bossy.  Maybe I could stop chatting a little though and allow the subjects to stop chatting and a more meaningful experience might be photographed.  I don’t know.  Maybe I need to trust that I am also part of the experience not just someone capable of setting the exposure values and pushing the button.

Another thing AN said in her article is that ‘it is the internal reality that is considered subjective and the external reality that is considered objective’ and she then continues to say that the Winnicottian third dimension, the shared intermediate reality that becomes the potential space – space I presume in this case for the photograph to be made.  I was very interested in this because I wondered immediately about the objectivity of external realities – really?  Is that how external reality is considered?  This is really news to me, although perhaps more so in light of my recent experience.  External realities have all seemed pretty subjective which makes the shared experience a tenuous, conflicted and difficult place to be.  Maybe that’s why I chat when working with the Other – to avoid that difficult tenuous shared experience that seems to me so scarily subjective and dotted with an alien landscape.

The subjects in ANs work seem to me lost, vulnerable, deeply saddened.  And very afraid of the shared space… Am I projecting my own identified fear onto her photographs?  I’m not sure.  Perhaps. 

*********

I ordered some colour calibrating software this week.  It had been on my long list of things to do for sometime but I didn’t really see the point so it got shoved to the bottom.  Well, I noticed how weird some reds were and it finally clicked.  So now it’s here.  And I really do notice the difference.  Will get there with all this stuff eventually.  But slowly, slowly.