Creativity Is Not Always Fun

 

An Autochome Photo (1900s)

Back in 2021, there was an article on CNN about the philosophies of leisure and how people process it in different ways. Some people will go on vacation and some people will just like to sit on the beach and some people are looking for something to do. I'm in the latter category. I like my mind to be engaged. Sitting on the beach for perhaps 10 minutes is kind of interesting. If I have my camera with me (which most people do these days) they're always taking pictures of things. But I think the reason we're taking pictures these days is for different reasons. It might not have anything to do with observation but can have everything to do with feeding images to the internet and burnishing our popularity. Ergo, not many people have leisure anymore. I find that leisure is working in some creative way. When I'm going out to take pictures I see it as leisure and is very relaxing. But it's leading to other things. Taking pictures is seen as a form of leisure but I never saw it that way. But I never saw it as work either. The smartphone has become kind of a "leisure machine" but people are moving towards it being a work machine. We're working for the camera.

In the early 80s, the Czech media theorist Vilem Flusser wrote Towards A Philosophy of Photography. One of his points was that we work for the camera. Camera manufacturers understood that and consequently, it started the camera bug phenomenon. 

"People taking snaps can now only see the world through the camera and in photographic categories. They are not "in charge of" taking photographs, they are consumed by the greed of their camera, they have become an extension of the button of their camera. Their actions are automatic camera functions. A permanent flow of unconsciously created images is the result. They form a camera memory, a databank of automatic functions. Anyone who leafs through the album of a person who takes snaps does not recognize, as it were, the captured experiences, knowledge or values of a human being, but they automatically realize camera possibilities." (p. 58)

Photography can be very engaging and rigorous if you want it to be so there's some work involved--it's not all leisure. Anything that is rigorous takes bigger blocks of time. There's a flow experience in what you're doing. Writing a book can take years--making a film can take years. But there's leisure time in there as well.

The Illuminated Riff: