Have you ever been so awestruck by a fellow artist's work that you felt intimidated or inferior?
Writer Maud Newton has. She confesses:
A couple weeks ago, I was reading Rupert Thomson’s gorgeously evocative, meticulously pared-down This Party’s Got to Stop.
About a third of the way through, I had to take a break. The essay I’m writing had stalled. My verbs seemed unconscionably obvious next to his, my sentences clumsy, my narrative voice about as natural as a conversation heard through a tin horn.
You're not alone, Maud. It happens to me all the time. For me it comes from looking at the work of photographers I greatly admire. For instance:
So what do you do when you suffer, as even Joan Didion too suffered, from "awe-inspired paralysis"?
Maud has her own trick.
For occasions like this, for the past couple years, I’ve kept on hand a well-reviewed novel that I don’t like or respect. It’s sitting on my desk right now, in fact. I don’t re-read it in any detail, because I don’t want it to contaminate my thinking, but flicking through the book makes me feel better about my own work, however imperfect it may be.
That's a good one if you're a writer.
As a photographer, I just take what inspires me about the work or style -- the pose, light, composition, film grain, whatever -- and file it away in my head. I may even go so far as to create an image or more in a favorite photographer's style just to get it out of my system.
The upshot here is that in the process I've (hopefully) learned something new about my craft by doing and not just looking. Even if I am only filing away the image for future reference the influence of my heroes is part of my work. Sometimes you see it in a final image, sometimes you don't.
I find great joy in the work of my favorite photographers (as Maud does in her favorite writers). It's almost as if each and every one of them is right there with me each and every time I make a photograph. Yeah, it's intimidating, but we make a damn good team.
File under chris buck, danny clinch, inspiration, jake chessum, maud newton, photography, robert maxwell, writing
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