Tuesdays with Ian:
Maxims for Revolutionary Photographers
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July 7th

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maxim |ˈmaksim|
noun
a short, pithy statement expressing a general truth or rule of conduct : the maxim that actions speak louder than words. ORIGIN late Middle English (denoting an axiom): from French maxime, from medieval Latin (propositio) maxima ‘largest or most important (proposition).’

pithy |ˈpiθē|
adjective ( pithier , pithiest )
(of language or style) concise and forcefully expressive.

revolutionary
adjective
1 rebellious, rebel, insurgent, rioting, mutinous, renegade, insurrectionary, insurrectionist, seditious, subversive, extremist.
2 a revolutionary kind of wheelchair new, novel, original, unusual, unconventional, unorthodox, newfangled, innovative, modern, state-of-the-art, cutting-edge, futuristic, pioneering.

How to use these Maxims. Take these questions and statements and extrapolate. Let them stir your soup. For example, if you were able to reinvent the concept of beauty, what would it look like? Some of these maxims appeared in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s book: Poetry as Insurgent Art. I have adapted them for photographers and wrote a few of my own.

Ponder!

Creating is not a sedantary occupation. Stand up. Grab your camera, your sketchbook. Let them have it!

What music do people hear when looking at your artwork?

Reinvent the concept of beauty.

Stand up and rap out loud in front of a mirror or video camera.

Give the gift of sight to a blind world. Be an eye for the blind.

The sunshine of your artwork casts long shadows.

Make the invisible visible.

Like a field of sunflowers, artwork should not have to be explained.

Haunt independent bookstores.

Allow yourself dazzling flight — flights of outrageous imagination.

Make art without an attachment to an outcome.

Be a songbird; not a parrot.

If there is nothing to shoot, shoot it.

Make a photograph of common household objects. While you are at it, clean the cabinet under the kitchen sink.

Spend a day making art only in your mind’s eye. Shutterless pictures stored in the work flow of your brain.

What if the greatest magazines are from outer space. What if you were filing photographs to some supreme photo editor who wants to understand Earthlings and has a low tolerance for bullshit.

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This post is for all of you who are interested in storytelling. These unique personal stories dreamed and drawn and erased and re-drawn for animation are amazing. Kentridge’s stories are certainly multimedia pieces. There are many other examples on You Tube. Google William Kentridge. I am very interested in hearing what you think.

History of the Main Complaint (1996)

For a synopsis of the film click here.

Weighing… And Wanting (1997)

Artist’s statement:

“I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending – an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.”

On living a lifetime in Johannesburg: “I have never been able to escape Johannesburg, and in the end, all my work is rooted in this rather desperate provincial city. I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and the films are certainly spawned by, and feed off, the brutalised society left in its wake.”

On his drawings: “The drawings don’t start with ‘a beautiful mark’. It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn’t have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion.”

Quotations from William Kentridge by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (1998), Societé des Expositions du Palais de Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles.

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This link was referred by Mark Gilmore. Thanks. Mark. Thanks TED.

Elizabeth Gilbert faced down a ­premidlife crisis by doing what we all secretly dream of – running off for a year. Her travels through Italy, India and Indonesia resulted in the mega-bestselling and deeply beloved memoir Eat, Pray, Love, about her process of finding herself by leaving home.

She’s a longtime magazine writer – covering music and politics for Spin and GQ – as well as a novelist and short-story writer. Her books include the story collection Pilgrims, the novel Stern Men (about lobster fishermen in Maine) and a biography of the woodsman Eustace Conway, called The Last American Man. Her work has been the basis for one movie so far (Coyote Ugly, based on her own memoir, in this magazine article, of working at the famously raunchy bar), and now it looks as if Eat, Pray, Love is on the same track, with the part of Gilbert reportedly to be played by Julia Roberts. Not bad for a year off.

Gilbert also owns and runs the import shop Two Buttons in Frenchtown, New Jersey.

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