My creative lesson 5 — Capturing life
2 February, 2020
Throughout my 2020 52Frames journey, I tried to write about the lesson in creativity that I have learned that week. My aim was to combine the written lesson with the weekly photo taken.
I managed to do this for about 40 of the 52 weeks. Being stuck at home because of the coronavirus helped quite a bit. The situation was quite depressing (as you may remember!) but it also gave me extra time to reflect and bring these lessons about creativity into focus.
There were however weeks where I had nothing. (Nothing to write about that is.) I still managed to take my photo of the week but either didn’t have the time to write the lesson or didn’t know what to write about.
Week five’s “Looking Down” challenge was one of those weeks. I remember having a lot of fun with this photo because I felt like an undercover agent. I stood on a pedestrian bridge in Ramat Gan during my lunchtime and spied at the people below through my camera’s viewfinder.
(I also think that the photo came out cool because of the unusual angle and the complementing colours.) Right?
Even though I had a lot of fun with the photo shoot, I didn’t know what the creative ‘lesson’ was.
Maybe that it is fun to spy on people?
It was only now, nearly a year after I took the photo, that I finally realized what the creative lesson of week five is.
It is actually the mother of ALL of the creative lessons. The lesson that once again explore the question of “WHY are we creative in the first place?”
Humans have captured their lives for like forever. From the Neanderthals drawing a mammoth hunt on a cave wall to the portrait painters of the 18th capturing people posing with large wigs and an assortment of pets to a teenager posting selfies on Instagram.
We seem to have this strong need, maybe instinct?, to record our lives.
So why do we have this need to record our lives?
If I want to play the ‘insightful intellectual’, I would speculate that it is because we want to leave our mark on the world. To send a timeless message to our descendants about how we looked and what we did. This is probably true on some levels but I do not think that ‘recording life’ is the real reason why we are creative.
I have taken too many photos and written too many words to think that is why we like to capture our lives. Leaving a message to my unborn grandchildren and the future of humanity is probably the least thing on my mind when I skulk above innocent passersby with my camera.
I take photos because I like to take photos. And I took the photo of these people below me because they were in front of my viewfinder. I write because I want to explore and order my thoughts — not because I want to chat to a future generation.
Van Gogh painted so many self-portraits because he wanted to paint and didn’t have a model. He basically painted anything in front of him, hayfields and vases with flowers and the night sky, because he wanted to paint.
Because we paint and photograph the images that are in front of us, we are capturing the world that we live in. How many paintings haven’t we seen of an artist’s studio, or her paintbrushes or breakfast?
One should not think that artists capture the world because they want to make a recording of the world as it is in a specific place and moment in time. Except maybe for that teenager taking bathroom selfies 😁.
It is rather the act of capturing that is the focus of the artist. I have often heard of artists releasing their work into the world without a further thought.
“It is time for the book/ painting/ movie to stand on its own now”, they say. “I have done my part.”
Why do we want to make art then?
This I do not know — I keep searching for the answers. Maybe it is because there is a universal force that are using us to replicate itself or because some of God’s creativity rubbed off on us when we were made.
The side-effect of all these acts of creativity is that in the end all these cool artifacts exist. One can see how haystacks looked like in France in 1888 because van Gogh painted them. Or what people wore in the winter of 2020 in Israel because I captured them forever.
We always go to museums and marvel at all the art inside it. It doesn’t always cross my mind that the museum exists because there were people who couldn’t stop painting and sculpting and creating.
All these artifacts are amazing but they never really answer the question of WHY they were made in the first place.
I will probably never get to answer this question. In the meantime I am here, writing my words and taking photos of innocent passersby - and capturing life- because I just cannot not do it.
Come and join us at 52Frames.com — it is free AND you will get to capture your life!
