Women in Focus, July 9, 2008
Emory Conference Center
Minutes by Leigh Kirkland
Members present: René D. Abney, Anne Berry, Hazel Berger, Marcia Blake Debra Booth, Andrea Brown, Shari Garza, Alicia K. Gelfond-Holtz, Ruth Gogel, Joanne Green, Valerie Gruner, Toni James, Dana Kemp, Rita Nicholas King, Leigh Kirkland ,Turner Kruger, Denice Lee, Kate Lynch, Karla May, Gittel Price, Linda Rathke, Shiela Robinette, Denise Savage, Ekatatrina Shapartova, Anupama Vishwamitra
Gittel called the meeting to order at 7:05.
New and Recent Members introduced: Hazel Berger organizes children’s birthday parties and art parties; currently running a summer camp in math and photography. Shoots landmarks, flowers, and children (hers are 8, 10, and 12).
Members Exhibits:
Rita Nicholas King has an opening tomorrow at Georgia State. The reception is from 4:00-7:00.
Ruth Gogel announced that Virginia Twinam Smith’s show of botanicals at the Universalist Unitarian Church ends Sunday. The show was reviewed in Creative Loafing.
Ruth has a show at the Atlanta Public Library in August & September.
Ekaterina announced that a Georgia to Georgia show opens at Composition Gallery on Saturday.
Gittel Price and Val Gruner are in the Chattahoochee Nature Center a Butterfly Exhibit, which opens Saturday, with butterfly releases each Saturday for the month of July.
René D. Abney has images in the “How About Dem Apples” show at Upstate Visual Art Gallery, Greenville, SC, opening August 1; and in the Art in the Park Festival in Greenville, September 20-21.
Susan Barmon has images in the “On The Edge” show at APG, opening Saturday, July 11.
Gittel, Amira, Toni, and Kate Lynch are in the RPS show at Digital Arts Studio for the month of July, “Hot Time Summer In The City”. With Open House Reception on Saturday 12th from 11 to 3.
Amira and Gittel Price are in the Mother and Daughter show at Roswell Visual Arts.
Kate Lynch, Gittel Price and Toni James in the Heritage Exhibit at the Wildflower Restaurant in Roswell.
Upcoming Women in Focus shows:
WIF XV Juried Exhibit will be at the Art Station in Stone Mountain September 6th to November 1st. Submit six (6) 8x10 pieces in a 9x12 envelope are due NEXT MONTH, August 13. Write title, BUT NOT YOUR NAME, on the back, and number the images 1 through 6. Identifying letters will be assigned at the meeting. Gittel will deliver them to the judge, Fay Gold, the next day. If you can’t come to the meeting, mail them to Gittel Price, 310 Birch Hollow Court, Roswell, GA 30075, has to be received BEFORE the meeting.
The submission form is on-line. Email notification of juried pieces will be Saturday August 16th. Delivery of framed pieces (16 x 20 or smaller, Black frame with white mat) begins from August 23 through 28th. Wired and ready for hanging.
Mark Alberhasky from Nikon will be at the August meeting if you need help determining the strongest images (of no more than 12).
Fay Gold seems to prefer the unusual and will choose images for our invitation.
Digital Arts Studio Artist’s Choice show will be delivered (by members) Saturday, September 27th. Reception is Saturday, October 4, 2008. One or two pieces, depending on DAS’s wall space; Gittel will check. Thirty-three members have signed up and paid for that show.
DAS will need submissions for the postcard soon, probably in mid-August.
The cost for EACH show is $20.
Other Business:
Members need to put their work on the website! Send $25 to Cindy at the WIF PO Box; send the CD to Jon Slate. Gittel has had gallery people asking, but too few of us have web presence. All instructions are on the website.
Flickr.com has a deal with Getty stock images; this is another good place to post.
Framing for our Exhibits ----------------------0pppppppppppppppppppp[]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]: FRAMES MUST BE WIRED..
Program: Craig Tanner, “Finding the Heart of Your Work”
A shortened version of a lecture he gave at B&H’s New York Conference
First, he’s not a preacher, just a photographer, although he’s interested in finding spirituality and spirit in art. He worships mystery.
Since he comes from the same place everybody else comes from—beginning photography—he likes to show his early work, which isn’t good.
JOURNALING is a means to get to the heart of your work. Start with a 20-minute writing session (how you got into photography, who led you there).
Find a purpose for your photography. Write a general overall purpose statement (“I want to help others achieve their highest vision of themselves”) and a purpose statement for your work that day.
He works with Marty Jeffords “The Next Step” creativity workshops.
Hitting on your true purpose will make you emotional.
Having a purpose statement (and hence a purpose) will make everything else, including rejection, easier. Knowing your purpose brings you back to NOW.
THREE STEPS: Write about at least one fear or judgment or limiting thought (i.e., photographing people) you have about yourself or your work. Do some work on it. Ask it questions. Fear and judgments set limits on the growth of your work. Fears become beliefs and shut you down.
Look at Byron Katie’s homepage www.thework.com for more information about these questions.
She has four questions to ask of [fear], to get to the truth of what is going on with you. ‘Is it true?’ ‘Can you absolutely know it is true?’ ‘What would it look like if I didn’t have this thought?’ ‘What happens to me (physically) when I think this thought?’ ‘Who would I be without that thought?’
LAST STEP: The Turnaround: turn around the fear.
You may think that your fear of photographing people is a fear of imposing on a subject, but often the one being imposed on is YOU; you fear letting people at you.
GRATITUDE is the necessary spiritual state, the highest state of being, higher than compassion. A lack of gratitude means you have an agenda. The truth about energy/creative resonance is that, like two tuning forks vibrating to the same note, what you put out comes back to you.
Be grateful: other people in creative gratitude come back to you.
Second part of journaling: See your shot in advance, at the point of completion. Write it down. At the level of imagination, be grateful for it, imagine sharing it with others. You will find its emotional heart.
Craig described finding emotional ‘sweet spots’ even in commercial shoots while scouting these shoots.
Recommended The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [directed by Julian Schnabel]. A Lensbaby is used in the opening shot.
Before going out to shoot, take 10-15 minutes of quiet, meditative time.
Paul Caponigro keeps a constant journal of storyboards outlining shots he wants to make. http://www.andrewsmithgallery.com/exhibitions/paulcaponigro/stilllifes/index.htm
“The Myth of Talent” (also an abbreviated version of CT’s longer lectures)
The first challenge: figure out your big fears as an artist. Always keep these on top of your list. Otherwise you get stuck on a plateau of what’s comfortable for you.
Move towards your fear.
“It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the courage to pay the price” Morris West.
CT became a photographer in 1988 during a serious illness, when for 30 minutes he was sure he was dying. He regretted that he wasn’t going to get to do what he had wanted to do.
He wanted to be an artist, quit his job as a cutlery warehouse manager to be a nature photographer. As a total beginning photographer, he spent six months in the west, and shot thousands of slides. All of them sucked. He saw them all at once at the end of the trip. ‘What had happened?’ he wondered.
When someone tells you that you can’t, clear them out of your life (at least on the third try).
Beliefs are assertions that are not absolutely true, but that we internalize as absolutely true.
Figure out what you believe relative to your art: Look at what you believe. You can be so much more if you base your art in your heart.
Just being talented means surviving being untalented. Long patience and tenacity lead to talent based in heart.
Be constantly productive. CT took 1700 pictures in June, a slow month.
Say ‘yes’ to almost everything as a photographer. The best stuff comes out of nowhere.
Photographer Sam Abell http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0202/abell_intro.htm says, Your best work is ahead of your ability to understand it.
Shoot loose.
The music producer Daniel Lanois tells the musicians he works with, “I believe in you more than you believe in you.” He is working with Brian Eno, who says “The best stuff comes out of nowhere. To be an artist is to work with nothing over and over.”
Beginners have as much power and chance as anyone else to work well with nothing.
If what you’re trying to do goes off the rails, meditate in your viewfinder. CT showed a series of pictures taken during a workshop on Jekyll Island when the students were bug-focused. CT took a shot every five seconds for (ten minutes), handheld, 30-seconds at f4. His wonderful spirit man in a beached tree came from this.
PREVISUALIZATION:
Look at www.theintentionexperiement.com ‘the largest mind over matter experiment in history.’ ‘It’s life-altering.’
CT believes in three levels of consciousness:
conscious choice
unconscious/subconscious—what wakes him up at five a.m. to work.
super-consciousness—what connects us and allows us to communicate with everything in the universe all the time.
This super-consciousness combines with previsualization to allow synchronicity when you imagine what you want to shoot.
The hallmark of CT’s work is rhythm, a rhyming of shapes and colors.
Listen to the T.E.D. talks (‘Ideas Worth Spreading’) on-line at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks : artists, thinkers, etc., talking about their work, especially Amy Tan on synchronicity as she imagines characters: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/250
Great art is THINKING CONNECTED TO FEELING.
Two ways of improving your work
Say yes to yourself as a photographer
Go into your imagination
CT is a big fan of the polarizing filter for landscape. Best at 90° to light. You can look through the polarizer and see what it will do. Vary it for different effects.
“Becoming Fearless”
Digital imaging exaggerates softness, diffraction. Stay around f11 with a wide angle lens to limit the softness.
CT focused on landscape for 11 or 12 years; was successful at it; was uncomfortable photographing people, but found it helped him build a community for his life. Get comfortable in front of the camera. Look into the lens and send a message of peace to the whole world. This fear is another way to say no to yourself. To photograph is to share your highest self with others.
Picture Man Robert Hall, Savannah, a deaf-mute, a saint, made his living taking and selling Polaroids of tourists on the street. Died May 2007: http://savannahnow.com/node/12011
(CT is currently working towards a documentary with cinematographer Jim Phelan (‘No Bigger than a Minute” http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2006/nobiggerthanaminute/index.html ).
Remember, it’s not what you’re doing; it’s how you’re being. Be congruent to your purpose.
Look into the technique of your art. Again, what are you saying ‘no’ to, technically? Where in the process are you saying no? Nothing you are against is helping your art/photography.
At all times, have five or six projects you’re working on. Give yourself projects. Get more conceptual. Learn a new art form. Always: make it emotional. What are you feeling? With these things in mind, there’s no such thing as block. Another art will inspire/infuse your photography. Music can inspire your art, too, more literally. You don’t have to look at your subject literally (c.f., CT’s pictures of St. Louis Arch). See Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire: http://www.wim-wenders.com/movies/movies_spec/wingsofdesire/wingsofdesire.htm
Two kinds of light: Working with good light is great technically. But what kind of light are you putting out? Get into that light. It (the image) doesn’t have to be ‘real’ or ‘somewhere.’ Art should be an inside-out process. Use it to connect to other people.
How does the feedback you receive connect to what anew her you want to be? Take care of the being part; everything else will follow.
CT teaches “The Next Step” workshop in Savannah.
Many people don’t believe in the super-conscious he describes, but keep in mind that the subconscious and the super-conscious are both informed by choices we make. Think about your choices as an artist as they relate to your purpose. The magic is practice, conscious practice, practice in the context of purpose. Practice in the place where you’re afraid.
He has found his blog on www.radiantvista.com (link on WIF website) to be a great motivator.