The Ebb and Flow

Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina

This blog has no real beginning–no inspiration, no epiphany, no “light bulb” moment. I’ve been going through older photos again, feeling what they evoke, allowing myself to be transported back to those specific moments. Creativity ebbs and flows, and even when it ebbs, sometimes you feel compelled to create. Sometimes you still have to make photographs or write something on your blog, even if it is just to “clear out the pipes” as a good friend of mine put it. It’s these times when I go back to old photos and look at them, think about them, play with them. Sometimes I go out and make photos as well, but they’re usually not worth sharing, or not at that time, anyway. Sometimes they are the photos that end up getting worked on and shared in moments like these. They are the B roll, maybe… the photos that you like, that you think should eventually see the light of day, but were not the ones that really moved you the first time around. Sometimes you are just too busy and they get lost in the shuffle.

I have written before about this mining process, this sort of time of reflection. It’s good to come back to older things with fresh eyes–you catch things you didn’t see before, or sometimes a new sensibility or aesthetic lends itself better to an image than the way you’d tried to work it originally. Sometimes you’ve just been carrying around the ideas in your subconscious for months, and they finally bubble back up to the surface and compel you to look back. Whatever the cause, I always think it is a worthwhile endeavor.

No one feels juiced and inspired and creative ALL the time. It’s just not possible. We hit ruts, dead ends, self doubt, fatigue. But remember that your moments of waning energy don’t negate all that you’ve done, or all that you will do. Every creative person I know is worried that one day they will tap out the force that drives and defines them, and will become less. That fire never really goes out, though.

Not every thing you make will be amazing, or groundbreaking, or all you’d hope it would be. Most of it isn’t–the bulk of the iceberg beneath the water. It is all important, though, since without it the great work would never have that accumulation of ideas, like so many snowflakes pressed hard into ice, buoying its powerful message up towards the sky, breaking the surface as if yearning to be seen.