Artistic Vision and My Personal Project, Nashville Playing
As I often do, I am tacking toward an understanding of what artistic vision is and specifically what my artistic vision is. It is surely not straight line learning. As I observed last week, I do not think artistic vision is an “after the fact” activity. In photography, artistic vision is at work when you understand why you are taking the picture and what message you hope to convey.
I need to come to grips with this because, as I have mentioned, I have a project that I am working on. I call it Nashville Playing, and it is about the impact music has on people who are in Nashville, either because they live here or because they are visiting.
Nashville is a city literally built on the tradition of a particular kind of music, Country Western music. It is a city that lives and dies with music, perhaps more than any other city I have ever been in. Music here feels personal to me. I want to tell that story. And so, once a week I go out and walk and re-walk the five blocks of Broadway.
Mostly I encounter swarms of people who are simply visiting an entertainment center. In some regards, it is a little like walking through Disneyland. There is a whole lot of sensory input. The various honky tonks are generally very colorful. If you want to shoot with a red background, that is available and so is turquoise, yellow and blue, and now pink with Miranda Lambert’s new establishment. Music, loud music, literally changes every 20 feet or so as you move by the various establishments. Being able to see and hear the band is an invitation to come in. There can be competing music from the the various rolling bars, i.e., the pedal bars, the tractor pulled drinking wagons and even a hot tub on wheels. The temperature is changing, too, because the bar windows are left open, so sometimes you get a little blast of cool air as you walk by. There are four lanes of traffic adding the noise and commotion of cars, trucks, motorcycles, skate boards, ATVs, horse drawn carriages and, of course, as mentioned, every manner of bar transports. Herein lies the problem. I am pretty sensitive to stimulation so it is really hard for me to not be in a state of some level of mental distraction most of the time. Let me assure you, I need all of the clear headed attention I can muster to take street photography.
My first swing at focusing my attention came as a result of a blog I wrote a couple of months ago about aspects of composition that can get viewer attention. I created a little cheat sheet on my iPhone. It seems to help me focus when I am looking for these things.
Things that are similar.
Things that are close to each other.
Things that are enclosed in region together
Things that are symmetric.
Things moving in the same direction.
Things that are parallel.
Things that fall on the same straight line or curve.
The next step in focusing my attention is the artistic vision step. I need to clarify why I am taking the pictures and what I hope to convey. Here is my starting point. It is very easy for me to imagine that all of the activity on Broadway is just mindless partying. But it is not mindless for the people who work there. Consider the greeters. There is a huge range in work behavior among greeters. Some just seem to have a good time doing their job. Some seem to be very, very serious about doing their job. Some are just doing their job. Some wish they were not doing their job. I would be spectacularly unsuited for this kind of work, which is mostly men’s work, anyway. It is hot outside or it is cold. You have to stand for long periods of time. You have to engage people hour after hour. I want to understand what it takes to work as a greeter so it is endlessly interesting to me to capture them at work. While I often take a street portrait, in the best of all circumstances I also include the world in which they work. A world that includes customers already in their establishment and an endless parade of potential customers outside of their establishment. For Nashville to play, they have to work.