intuition and art
Intuition…. I feel like I am surrounded by this word, in a probably good way but nonetheless. And a place it’s been coming up is art. Of course! I first started thinking about art and intuition in May 2022. I watched a Todd Hido lecture then and he talked about his process and the role intuition plays. I even wrote about that lecture before, May 24, 2022, but regarding narrative in photography/art. I recall wanting to write this but obviously, it wasn’t the time yet… And now is apparently.
This winter I quietly finished a project that was very much an out-of-the-blue thing, that has turned out to be one of my favorites, as well as one of my most complete. In late January, I had three extra days off surrounding my weekend so I decided to fly to Portland and vacation. It was dual purpose, one of my favorite bands was on a very rare tour, stopping there, and I could relax away from the snow and mountains to just art for the weekend. This project was birthed from that.
Stills from an Unmade Film is a two-piece project, with a 52-second video and a series of photos. Both the video and photos have a 2.37:1 aspect ratio, the same ratio as many movies. I also tried to make the editing look like a film, not just digital. But those are just some of the technical parts of the projects I did. We are here to talk about intuition.
Through my adventures about the city of Portland, I had my camera with me as much as possible and took as many photos as possible. This enabled me to follow my intuition day and night in what I captured, being spontaneous and constant in my compositions. I’ll revisit that last statement shortly. But in Todd Hido's lecture, there was a part when he was talking about a photograph from his third monograph, Roaming, I believe, and how intuition played such a huge role in his work. It was one of the forces that drove him to decide when to press the shutter and how to compose the image. In another part of the lecture, he connects the idea of having media constantly surrounding him to its influence on his work because of its effect of sinking in and being used subconsciously in creating his own art. We know that intuition is very reliant on pattern recognition and matching to deliver judgments in the moment, without conscious deliberation, by using long-term memory and present senses to identify and compare similar situations. By doing this, our brain has a lot more access to stored memory, impressions, emotions, and judgments about previous situations. And by surrounding yourself with photographs/art, and by taking photographs/making art, you get, at least I believe, better at using your intuition.
So by keeping my camera with me the entire trip, taking photos a ton, as well as editing old photos, looking at art books, and staying curious (a topic for another day), I created a space where using my intuition to make art was a lot more open and accessible. Compositions arose from street corners on a walk. Lighting spilled into the train window at the right moment, lifting my camera to my eye without much thought. As I said above, I could be spontaneous and constant in my photos. This cultivated a style of movement, continuity, and ease in the photos. This is what tied the photos to the idea of a film for me. I don’t know what film these photos were from, but they were just stills in a sea of moments in a life. And lastly, I liked having the train video to help bring in the idea of a film, but unlike the photos that exhibited motion and liveliness, the film is very static. Not literally, there is actual movement the whole time, I was on a train. But the framing and subject is very static, the editing is kinda flat, an attempt to role reverse the still and motion pictures. All of this arising very much in the moment, with no part of this project being planned or premeditated. I actually almost entirely sequenced and assembled the project after I had got home, not realizing the potential of the photos until then.
So it goes, some of the best work is semi-accidental, creating an artwork more honest and true than many of my premeditated and carefully planned ideas. I have since made intuition a huge part of my workflow, rarely ever planning a shoot and using my phone camera more often. And because of this, my work has also shifted a bit in style, feeling more honest in almost every facet. But that is another post as well. Anyways, thanks for reading the ramble, enjoy the photos, and look forward to more!
