December 2009: Optimism

For me, beauty is optimism made visible. In earlier newsletters this year we have talked about working within ourselves, using what is at hand and making images close to home, giving ourselves permission to take an hour out of our busy weeks to make photographs, to be aware while we are making images perhaps finding new images in our “mistakes”, and celebrating the fact that we are creative people. Every one of us is creative in one way or another. I see creativity as optimism, and I think it is optimism that has gotten us through the past year. If we are still able to go out and make images we care about even when it feels like the world is filled with chaos and tragedy, the act is both creative and beautiful. If I let worry and fear enter my creative sphere then I am not ready or able to do the work I want and need to do.

It has been a good, if tough, fourteen months for Donna and myself. November 2008 our third book, Odin Stone, arrived from the bindery. We had worked most of the previous year raising the money for publication and organizing these images of the Orkney Islands from concept to completion. It debuted that November with an exhibit at the Addison Woolley Gallery in Portland (ME). Within days we began the layout work for A Walk Along The Jordan, which arrived by truck the day before we left for Utah for the opening exhibit of this work at the Salt Lake Arts Center. Odin Stone covered work created between 2002 and 2007 while most of the images for A Walk Along the Jordan were photographed primarily between February 2006 and October 2008. (There are some images shot before 2006 but not many.) So for a while I was photographing and organizing for two books at the same time.

If you look at the two books side by side, you will notice an overlap in style, technique, and vision. Although they cover different subject matter they are both about relating to and experiencing a specific environment. In one sense Odin Stone was easier to shoot because of the uniqueness (to me) of the environment. In that same sense the Jordan River project was much tougher because it was an area familiar to me, in my back yard so to speak. I didn’t have the experience of “going” somewhere special to make photographs. I got in the car, drove a few blocks or a few miles and began walking along the river trying to see something new and different. It was in every sense an ordinary location, in some places the river beautiful, in others less so. When I told people I was working on a book on the Orkney Islands they may not have known where it was but when I told them it was in Scotland they understood why I would want to photograph there. On the other hand when I told people I was photographing along the Jordan River, most asked “Why”?

I photographed along the Jordan River in a sense because it was there. I was in Utah teaching and my family was back in Maine. It was what I did on the weekends. It was a challenge to make something beautiful out of something ordinary. The more I walked along the river the more I began to I understand its place in the community. The more I studied its history the more important it became to me. Essentially photographing the river provided me a reason to get out and make photographs, and from that grew the challenge to myself to produce a coherent body of work from this ordinary place. It reinforced my belief that there was much to learn from photographing in my own “backyard”. I remembered that I didn’t need the excitement (or time and expense) of distant travel to see with fresh eyes. In many ways this idea is what I have been trying to write about over the past year: finding the beauty where I am as well as in who I am. It is, in a sense, in rediscovering the beauty that lies within my own vision I can better appreciate that found in the vision of others.

It is indeed a form of optimism that allows me to got out and seek such beauty. As the days continue to shorten over these next weeks let us remember to use the power of our individual creativities to remain optimistic. Make images for yourself as you move into the New Year of possibilities.

I wish you much joy this Holiday season!

Tillman