Creativity and Play- Keeping loose

Kai ora tatou:
Playing and development go hand in hand. We all know that. We just have to watch a small child playing to see the importance fo play. As they make stuff in the sandpit, or organise tea parties for their dolls or fiddle with that Lego set, there is a lot of learning and self-development going on. It’s how kids grow.

What is even more important is the fact that it is all un-self-conscious. Kids do it because they do it because well, it is fun. They don’t measure success in terms of self-development. They measure it by the fun they had, and whether they want to do it again.

So what happens when we become adults? Just have a look at the use of play in adult terms? We play up, we play around, we play down (something), we play for keeps. All of these meanings have some kind of motive attached to them. Rarely, if ever do we just play……

As adults, we tend to measure achievement using different markers; financial, career, status, competition success, our photographic letters perhaps. We begin to get get serious about our photography and become goal-oriented. As a consequence we can become increasingly narrow in our focus and the spontaneity may disappear from our work. Our creativity suffers. Our photographs may become stereotypical or same old same old, or may even get boring.

I want to suggest that playing is important. Being willing to be open to new subject material, to just explore and enjoy photography for its own sake is, I believe, a critical part of avoiding becoming predictable and stodgy. Photographing things we haven’t tried can be fun, can show us new things or ways of seeing, or even point us in new directions. We need to explore and play and try out things that may seem silly at the time.

We need to circle around our subjects, shooting from different angles and discovering with our cameras. Great artists know this: David Hockney explored photography for some 2 years, playing with the concept of how we look at things, created masterpieces, including the wonderfully complex Pear Blossom Highway, and then moved on. What started out as play became a photographic event that showed a new way of making images with a camera.
With a digital camera, we have no excuse for not doing lots of play( photographic, that is!)
We can do the same as Hockney; we can explore whatever takes our fancy.
Now I love the landscape. Being out there and working with light and the land is a supreme joy. But sometimes I need to walk away. It is all too easy to get in a groove and become formulaic.

The image above came one morning when I got out of bed (no, contrary to some opinions, I do not sleep suspended from the rafters!). As I climbed out of bed, I saw the way the light slid across the bed and created a domestic landscape. I grabbed my Sony, formatted a card and filled it with variations on essentially the same idea. I know it’s not a new idea (Imogen Cunningham did it a long time ago), but it was fun, it didn’t cost much, it has awoken my interest in photographing domestic objects, and it has tuned up my awareness of light.

Best of all, it may be the start of a whole new journey.
Ka kite ano