The important thing is to keep trying to make the gap shrink each time you create something new.
Creativity sometimes takes more than one person, even if they’re both in the same body.
I’ve never been in a studio, ever, with no material and just gone in and said “Oh, I’ve got this idea.”
To go in a studio and set the amps up and just… “Yeah man, we just went in and just fuckin’ played, you know, whatever…” That’s not art. To me, that’s not art, that’s just fuckin’ about.
To me, art is writing it and re-writing it. To get from a point of playing the first chord to listening to it at the end there’s got to be some kind of emotional journey between you and the song. It can’t just be, like, fuckin’… a thousand percent inspiration. It doesn’t work like that for me.
—
Noel Gallagher, “It’s Never Too Late to Be What U Might Have Been - The Making of Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds”
What’s interesting is that the more I shoot for myself, the more I realise that this is exactly the approach I take to get some of my favourite photos.
In the knowledge that I’m going to die one day, I’m walking away from yet another internet argument. I really don’t want to be lying on my deathbed thinking “yeah, I really highlighted that person’s logical fallacy in that forum that no-one remembers back in ‘11.”
Life’s too short.
Weather like we’re having today makes me want to get as many people as I can to reproduce Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare.
Just sayin’.
Late night notebook
Being awake late at night is a bit like being drunk, for me. It gives me license to think big, silly thoughts without any consequences. I tweeted this a few days ago, in a fit of earlymorning brainjuicing:
2am. Can’t sleep. Thoughts and hopes and fragile dreams run through my brain. I shall do the impossible, for I am mighty.
Anyway, thoughts running through my head tonight:
- Heavily styled couple shoots. Not a new idea, but could be interesting to try both in the studio and on location. Imagine if your wedding / anniversary / whatever invites had pictures of you shot like movie stars.
- Dancers. Always wanted to photograph dancers. Everyone does ballerinas in grotty locations, though. What about street performers in the Royal Opera House?
- Gods. Gods, gods, and more gods. Dark and light; British gods.
- What would the Rapture look like on film (dry ice in empty shoes aside)?
- What do people dream of when they’re working behind the till in Wilkinsons or Matalan? More juxtaposition of dreams and reality.
Random thought at 05:50
Clarity in photographs is easy. Deliberate unclarity, hiding or partially-suggesting things in an image, is hard.
(I don’t necessarily know what that means or if it even means anything, by the way. Coherence is hanging by a thread here; it’s 05:50 and I haven’t slept).
