Transform

Zack Arias beautifully addresses and those deep seated questions that I often ask myself in a delightfully humorous and profound emotion evoking way in this clip. Why am I doing this? What is the bigger picture? What keeps me going. What difference in the world am I making.  I all too often have looked at other photographers and compare myself to them too. I battle inner demons between finding a way to do what I love and discover it’s meaning and define how I am helping the world in some minute way and actually making money. Some times the 2 never seem to mesh and I feel caught in the middle between wanting to make a difference wanting to make money.

I have to believe that that there is a balance and there is sustainability in being an artist. It’s a strange paridigm when you feel caught between doing what’s meaningless and what’s in your heart yet you can’t quite explain why you are compelled to follow this inner drive. In the end we all need to make a living and the camera is like the paint brush it’s a tool to use to express this inner creativity. The inner creativity is a gift and not all are born with it. Those of us who have it can learn different ways to express it using different tools and developing technical proficiencies and that is a learned skill while I believe creative vision is not necessarily learned. Some have it some don’t. Some fall in love with the art they see and try to replicate that by coping it and as it is often said “Imitation is the finest form of flattery”.  For those of us that have it in us we must realize it’s a gift and sharing our vision thru our art is not only an inner calling but our duty to humanity. 

For me the Ah Ha moment came when I became more educated on how art and culture make this world a better place. There are economic studies on how bringing art in to a community helped drastically alleviate crime and poverty. Countless cities are bringing art and culture to the forefront of community redevelopment programs for this very reason. Yet despite the fact and that over 92% of americans agree it is important to support the arts only 25% support artists. That’s like believing in education yet not paying the teachers or supporting the military but not paying our soldiers.

Research shows that 1% of the images  we see are for every other possible reason then to sell you things and the other 99% we are saturated with are simply to sell us things. Are we selling our creativity to commercialism, absolutely and some of us make a very good living at it. Money = Power and how we spend it sends a very big statement.

In the last year I have had the amazing opportunity to be in a room full of artists on numerous occasions in various workshops and the common thread they all had was not about being rich and having things but every single person I listened to in some way wanted to better the world using their art as that vehicle and wanted a way to have sustainability in their career.  They wanted to make a decent living doing tremendous empowering things that would touch tons of lives. Yet many of these people struggle to make a living doing this yet they a have an amazing amount of creativity.

I myself will think more today then I  ever did on how I shop and seek out ways to support local artists verses mass commercialization. As simple as do I go to the mall or take the kids to an arcade do I go to an art opening and support a local artist or arts event.  And despite how I struggle with writing I will take an hour out of today to write this all down because I hope by sharing this it brings a fresh perspective or reiterates one you all ready have.