A great series of 6 videos about the life and writing of Ursula le Guin.
A number of things interested me with this video series. The description of the journey being the thing that matters reinforces the idea of art as adventure. The path is made in the walking of it to quote Zhuang Zhi. The act of making your art is inseparable from the act of making yourself.
The path is made in the walking of it
Zuang Zhi
So whilst the author published goes on to be read by others the first reader is the author herself. She sees herself on the page, her own words as subjective objects. Her life reified.
The product is important but the process of making the product, the journey, is what matters.
A way of working with art as a form of experiential learning is the idea of the review or reviewing. The simplest version of the experiential learning cycle goes ‘Plan – Do – Review’. Experiential learning nods to Kolb and Dewey but is presented here as a way of learning through doing that is cyclical or recursive. We learn through personal experience in situ. It is in contrast with schooling which tends to value the input of curriculum and output as testing in a linear way.
The capacity to have experience and learn from it is a central aspect of our consciousness. We maybe don’t think of it that way as thinking, writing, talking about things then making plans and acting on them seems so normal and simple. Humans do it in a way that seems a bit different to other living things. It is maybe a blessing and a curse. Art reviews our experience in many ways. But with photography, the act of ‘Taking a photo’ does this in a very immediate and concrete way. The act of framing a shot, on a phone or with a camera immediately reviews how we see the world. Then we make an image and put it in some place other than where we took the photo, with a caption, in the public domain, or a chosen person. This is an amazing thing to do.
A favourite photographer of mine is the street photographer, Garry Winogrand. I love his images. He took thousands of images in New York and after his death, thousands more were found on unprocessed 35mm films. Of his practice, he said ‘I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.’ This struck a chord with me. I posted 400 of my favourite photos and the act of sharing still seems strange. I never took them with the intention of showing or sharing them.
I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.
Garry Winogrand
If Winogrand had vast numbers of images entirely unseen, I kind of figure he may also have some relationship with the act of taking the photograph that is different to the showing the photograph. He talks about photographing as a way of ‘finding out’ about something. It is the process of photographing that has value for him as much as the product, the photograph and the photograph shared. This to me is an act of research. To search for something is an act of finding some specific thing. The French ‘recherché’ means to seek something out with care and add value to it. In art making, we find value in things.
Below are links to Winogrand’s work. He does what all artists do, he engages in an act of reviewing. Below whatever words we find to describe this act, art and photography allow us to review experience.
Fraenkel Gallery- Winogrand Portfolio
Guardian article – Garry Winogrand: the restless genius who gave street photography attitude
My daily walk in the morning is now overlapping the darkness before sunrise. I walk as the rookery wakes and masses in the nearby Oak tree. We now rise and depart together as the night’s darkness departs. I always say hello.
As the light of summer departs a new year is upon us. Samhain is the end of the year in the Celtic calendar. As dusk is the end of the Celtic day. The Celts started their day and their year in darkness. The proper order, for we all start in darkness, as do all seeds. A moment for time travel. Looking to the future. Remembering the past. Ones we have lost. Time is upon us.
So too am I remembering the past. I have been going back over my photography archive, all the way back to 2005 when I got my first digital camera. It holds 13000 photos. This surprised even me. I edited this down to my 400 best and put them up on my portfolio site. Click the image below to go to my portfolio and see the images. I chose a picture of geese because they are honking overhead now as they return for the winter. Time turns. It is circular.
Click me to see…
I also bring you Van the man singing Celtic New Year, on Jools. There is a very grainy clip of this on Yootyoob but this one is best. He starts at about 3m 55 sec. He so captures for me, that sense of darkness and light, longing for absent friends, some passed over to eternal darkness, and light, the looking forward to meeting friends again even if it is when we pass over into darkness. Like “Bette Davis said, “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.” We begin and end in darkness. Peace at last. I head this post with an image of the coming green of spring. See you on the other side.
O hushed October morning mild, Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; To-morrow’s wind, if it be wild, Should waste them all. The crows above the forest call; To-morrow they may form and go. O hushed October morning mild, Begin the hours of this day slow, Make the day seem to us less brief. Hearts not averse to being beguiled, Beguile us in the way you know; Release one leaf at break of day; At noon release another leaf; One from our trees, one far away; Retard the sun with gentle mist; Enchant the land with amethyst. Slow, slow! For the grapes’ sake, if they were all, Whose leaves already are burnt with frost, Whose clustered fruit must else be lost— For the grapes’ sake along the wall.
An introduction to the vastness of geological time. I live by the Solway, between England and Scotland, once either side of the Iapetus Ocean.
My calculation gives humans appearing at 39.998 seconds.
That is the last 0.012 seconds.
At some point soon I will publish timeline calculators you can apply to a walk to measure human life against geological time. It makes geological vs human timescales physically perceptible.
Moving Space 