Edges: Where Things Occur
Part 1: Edges & Exploration
“[C]reativity is inherently . . . tied up with process, you cannot escape it.” –Joe Cornish
form: manner or style of performing or accomplishing according to recognized standards of technique. —Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Edges
Tom Robbins, renowned novelist and “cosmic lounge lizard” had, according to the New York Times, morphed from a strict Southern Baptist upbringing “into a moonbeam of the counterculture” in the 1970s. Robbins was never at a loss for the enigmatic, oddball, prophetic turn of phrase—or entire novel. Robbins, known for “very weird . . . hilarious and curiously moving” novels like Jitterbug Perfume and Still Life with Woodpecker, was by all accounts a meticulous writer who knew “words the way a pool hustler knows chalk.” One of Writer’s Digest 100 Best Writers of the 20th Century, Robbins was a well-known art critic in Seattle, Washington. Robbins thought of himself “as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.” Robbins, nevertheless, continued to write about art in his fiction.
In Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Robbins gave sound instruction to the artist.
If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic.
Enticing tuition for the artist. Who among us does not desire entry into the realm of magic? This directive to push art to the “wildest edge of edges” has provided me with a key to unfurling a vast expanse for exploration and discovery in my photography. When speaking of pushing any discipline beyond the “wildest edge of edges” Robbins, for me, is speaking of form, that is, “manner or style of performing or accomplishing according to recognized standards of technique”—what landscape photographer Joe Cornish calls process and what American fine art photographer Ralph Gibson refers to as the protocols of photography. Robbins’ invitation to the artist is to go beyond the limitations confronting all manner of creative engagement, including those “recognized standards of technique.” Mirriam-Webster’s form, Cornish’s process and Gibson’s protocols are the parameters within which all photographers must work.
However, I see Robbins’ form as something broader than recognized standards of technique, process or protocols. Robbins’ form is bespoke for each of us and encompasses aspects spanning the unique to the universal. This form concerns the methods employed by the artist, rather than the goal, the achievement, the outcome as form is often defined in art. This form is that distinct space—physical, emotional, material and metaphoric—in which we dwell as artists creatively engaged. Form includes limits, boundaries, that confine that space—frontiers for exploration, at the outer limits of which lie Robbins’ “wildest edge of edges.”
I see this broader version of form as a structure within which artists must dwell and work while creatively engaged, including everything that promotes or limits our efforts. It involves every aspect of the creative process. Form for the photographic artist includes the genres, subjects and thematic approaches we choose. It includes our gear and post processing, whether we practice near or far afield, digital or analog and our intimacy with the areas and the conditions within which work. It what is achievable with whatever gear is in one’s kit and the proficiency one has with it—our understanding of and proficiency with “how film sees the world,” as Ansel Adams put it. It includes the ability and aptitude to access, interact and commune with desired locations and subjects. It includes one’s capacity to work in the conditions met, as well as the personal constraints we all have as people. Our physical condition, our locality and our ability or willingness to travel, and constraints on resources and time. It even includes the thoughts, feelings, emotions, preconceptions and expectations we bring to each and every step along the process of creative engagement.
Photography is bound on all sides with the parameters of this more expansive version of form. These strictures and boundaries shape our creative efforts and output. For me, however, the ultimate importance of form lies not in its structure, per se, not in the boundaries that hem us in. Rather, form’s significance lies in a purposeful, contemplative engagement with that framework and its limits, that is to say, the critical and ever-evolving relationships we build and cultivate with that space within which we are bound, in which we dwell while creatively engaged.
Exploration
Applying a broader interpretation of form, Robbins’ edict becomes a personal invitation to explore that structure, that space we all inhabit while engaged creatively. To make a house a home. It is an invitation coaxing me “to push [my art] beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges” that limit me and the outcomes I seek from creative engagement. It is an invitation that perhaps should be accepted by anyone engaging with creativity and artistic expression. Robbins’ edict is to explore the imaginative space that form, that process and the protocols of photography, provides. This is that space we inhabit as individual artists, such that we evolve, grow and move toward that realm of magic. To evolve as artists, we must assess and reassess our expectations from and our relationship with this comprehensive form, from the mundane to the esoteric, from form’s universal aspects applicable to all engaged in expressive photography to those unique to our individual efforts.
We must do so with our gear and technology. And with our ability to achieve desired outcomes with the tools we employ, our intimacy with their means and limits, and how those determine the outcomes we seek. It means examining our relationships with and connections to our creative environs, whether near or far afield, before we arrive, in situ and after we depart, and how those relationships and connections inhibit and enhance our creative efforts. For those of us engaging with the landscape, it means examining and gaining an understanding of the history of a place and our history with that place as it evolves over time. It means ever striving to gain a better understanding of what we can expect when in those environs in which we choose to make images in terms of weather, mood, atmosphere—both material and metaphoric. We must strive to foster an ability to engage with the creative process when expectations are met, when they prove unfounded, or when we abandon them altogether. And it means examining our relationship with ourselves, our goals and aspirations as artists and the means to achieve them, that is, form.
When we, as photographers and artists, explore our engagement with form and our relationships with its components, no matter “how trivial or mundane” those things can seem, we open a path that can take our art “to such extremes that [we] illuminate its relationship to all other things . . . to that point of cosmic impact.” Once open, that path sets a bearing on the “wildest edge of edges” and perhaps a glimpse, if not entry into, that “realm of magic.” As grandiloquent as this may sound, I am convinced of the practical impact such an approach can have in the creation of meaningful images. I am not alone, it would seem. Joe Cornish said that “photographic creativity, is also inherently a reflection of process, [form,] both the science of photography itself and the limits on the materials, the methods and the equipment that [are] available to you at the time. I think that is a very important lesson to learn and is a great springboard because you can use [to your advantage] the limitations and the oddities that are the photographic process. . . . [P]rocess and creativity to me are intrinsically linked and importantly so.” Or as, artist and photographer Chuck Close put it, “If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you.”
Following Robbins’ guidance to push art as far as it will go could provide the artist a route to those edges of form where, I would amend, the artist may coax art “into the realm of magic.” It is this engagement, this process, that I believe could be a foundation from which any artist to pursue any goal, any outcome, they seek to achieve, both in any given moment and over the long term of committed creative engagement. This requires a commitment to probing our relationships with form and its innumerable facets, becoming so well versed in form as it pertains to our efforts that its boundaries become inviting, enticing us to explore those edges. We must see our limits not as a threat to achieving the outcomes we desire, but, rather, we must see them as an invitation, calling us forward so we can push ourselves and our art toward those “wildest edge of edges.” As film critic and essayist Phillip Lopate promises, “The fulsome confession of a limit carries the secret promise of an almost infinite opening-out.” One limit I confess to is that I am a regional photographer, constrained by time, circumstances and resources to working nearly exclusively in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts.
Next: Limits & the Zen Universe
In Part Two, I dig deeper into the boundaries we work within—geographic, creative, personal—and how they can become points of inspiration rather than restriction. From the invented name of the Pioneer Valley to Tom Robbins’ one-sentence-at-a-time writing ethos, I explore how deliberate, even meditative, engagement with form can shape not just the art but the artist. Each edge we find may just be a threshold, an entry into a realm of magic.