Part 2: In Which the Foxy Ira Glass Makes Way for Philosophical Speculation

Part 1 can be found here. This is Part 2.

So, due to a creative crisis I had last summer, I have since been obsessed with understanding creativity and how my art can make me so passionately happy and so passionately miserable (which I think is the case for many artists). With the help from things the forever foxy Ira Glass said, I came up with these three areas of emotion that artists create.

FORMULA EMOTION is the creation of emotions in artistic works that are universal and expected (no surprises). It doesn't break the mold, it IS the mold. Most popular art falls into this emotion. Wedding photography in particular is very formulaic. Wedding photographers have to show a universal idea of love in my pictures if it's going to be well received. It must appeal to the universal idea it's presenting. There are, of course, varying degrees of formula. I try to shoot more on the interpretive side.

The following pictures are recent shoots I've had that display the idea of formula emotion. Although they are lovely pictures (of lovely people I might add), they are in essence simply pictures of people who look like they are in love in beautiful settings. As much as photographers like to think otherwise, none of us coined this idea. It is formula.

ABSTRACT INTERPRETIVE EMOTION is the subjective vision of the artist without any care for anyone else's opinion or input. It disregards an audience's standard of aesthetics and is therefore less appreciated or wanted by the masses. It's the true insides of an artist's mind. It's not abstract in the sense that it has no form or technique, it's abstract because it's a new or different way of looking at something for the artist. It's unique to the artist's thoughts. An example of this is the series I did at the concentration camp near Munich. I'm not sure I've ever shot more honestly my vision of what I was experiencing. It's not as aesthetically pleasing or technically groundbreaking as my other work sometimes is, but it's me and these pictures are intensely personal because of it. These pictures aren't meant to manipulate any particular response from an audience, only interpret, without pretense, what I experienced.

REAL EMOTION is as simple as it sounds... it's real. It's the very most organic feeling of universal truths. It's not created, it just is. Although an artist uses different mediums to capture and emphasize this real emotion, the important thing in this is that it's not the artist's agenda being presented. The only thing an artists does here is be a vessel to capture the reality of the situation. An example of this in my work is my recent shoots of childbirths (what is more real than childbirth?).

I've found that I'm in a very interpretive to real phase right now. I love shooting things I've never shot before and I love shooting honestly. I love when I take a picture that isn't really that great technically, but I find it powerful anyway. Technique, although infinitely important, isn't the most important thing in art... it's emotion. Whether it's formulaic, abstract interpretive, real, or a blur of all three, emotion is the only reason I keep doing what I do.