July 7th

5 PM Eastern
4 PM Central
3 PM Mountain
2 PM Pacific

Join us for this One Hour Participatory Event
Register Here:

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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© 2010 Ian Summers - HEARTSTORMING - please visit heartstorming.com for more information on Heartstorming Career Coaching.
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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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© 2010 Ian Summers - HEARTSTORMING - please visit heartstorming.com for more information on Heartstorming Career Coaching.
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iansummers@heartstorming.com
+1 610-438-5707

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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© 2010 Ian Summers - HEARTSTORMING - please visit heartstorming.com for more information on Heartstorming Career Coaching.
Thank you for subscribing.
iansummers@heartstorming.com
+1 610-438-5707

What if Everything You Have Been Taught About the
Marketing of Creativity is Wrong?

Tuesday, February 24th
6-9 PM
Calumet Photographics
22 West 22nd Street, NYC

Not the Twenty Minutes I’ll Tell You What to Do Portfolio Review

Spend an Hour with Me on February 25th

One Hour Appointments Beginning at 10 AM

APA|NY Offices, 27 W 20th Street, Suite 601, New York NY

$200.00 Payable by Credit Card

Call or Write Ian Directly to Register

iansummers@heartstorming.com

610-438-5707

This is not the Twenty Minute — I’ll tell you what do — rushed portfolio review. Instead, each participant will receive a full hour of Ian’s time. He feels that it is more effective when there is at least a half hour of questions and answers to build a context for what a photographer will show him. As a result of the time allotted for each session, only six portfolio reviews will be possible. So sign up as far in advance as you can. Bring your portfolio. Send Ian your URL so that he can look at it in advance of the meeting. And if you have work that is not in the portfolio or on the website bring it with you. Once your appointment is made Ian will call for a brief interview and tell you how to prepare for this session.

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© 2010 Ian Summers - HEARTSTORMING - please visit heartstorming.com for more information on Heartstorming Career Coaching.
Thank you for subscribing.
iansummers@heartstorming.com
+1 610-438-5707

Three of my 2008 liveBooks sponsored webinars are now available on-line.

Thanks to liveBooks for making them available at no cost to you.

Each multimedia presentation is an hour l0ng.

A schedule for 2009 will be posted at the liveBooks site.

Webinar One

What if Everything You Learned About the

Marketing of Creative Services is Wrong?

The world of commercial photography, as we have known it, has changed. The industry needs to focus on severing ties with the past and to invent innovative ways to find and proclaim a new vision – institutionally and individually. We all know there is something wrong. We have experienced the devaluation of services provided by commercial photographers. We have tried to fix things with obsolete tools. In order to grow their business in today’s market, photographers must have the courage to let go of many old beliefs. In this series, I identify and dispel ten prevalent myths that prevent change, growth, and thwart creativity. In this session, I expand upon the first myth.

Myth #1

You Must Do One Thing and Do it Well.

Opportunity

You may do many things and do them all well.

Webinar Two

The Photography Industry’s

Sales Promotion Dilemma

In this chapter of Ian Summers’ Webinars, I identify and dispel the email myth and talk about the opportunities and expectations for effective photographers’ sales promotions.

Myth:

If I send out an email marketing blast every few weeks,

I better hire someone to answer the droves of phone calls

asking me to bid on their next campaign.

Opportunities

Of course, email may be

an effective element in

a photographer’s marketing plans.

I believe there are some questions that must be asked before you choose any medium. Before you begin to create a marketing plan, questions like: Who am I? Where am I going? How am I going to get there? But this discussion is about sales promotion.

What Do You Want Your Promotions to Accomplish?

“I just want to keep my name out there.”

Warning: That is not enough!

Learn how to Achieve the
Oh Yeah! Response

Oh yeah! Joan Jones. I know who she is.

I know what she does and how she sees.

Her promotion is pinned up over my desk.

I am hoping to find an application for her work

next time an opportunity arises.

Use the same creative energy you apply to making photographs

to produce imaginative and effective sales promotions.

Webinar Three

Is Photography Your Calling?

Calling and Talent

Vision is a calling. A calling is an inner urge or a strong impulse, a passion, some believe a calling may be divinely inspired. How will the world be a different place as a result of your visit on the planet? What is your calling? What is it that you feel the urge and passion to bring into being no matter what?

Do you have a natural marked innate ability, for artistic accomplishment? That is a definition of talent. Talent and calling must be present to sustain a career as a professional photographer in the first decade of this new century.

Learn How to Set Goals that Don’t End Up in the Back of a Drawer.

Take Back Your Power to Create.

In this Webinar, I will help you articulate your calling

and find ways to stay on your path.

Identify what you want

and set priorities that will help you stay focused.

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© 2010 Ian Summers - HEARTSTORMING - please visit heartstorming.com for more information on Heartstorming Career Coaching.
Thank you for subscribing.
iansummers@heartstorming.com
+1 610-438-5707

Miguel de Cervantes

What absurd things have you done this week?

Make a list of ten things you have done that you used to believe were impossible?

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them to the impossible.

Arthur Clarke

What have you done that stretched you beyond your limits?

What conditions need to be present for you to make the impossible possible?

We adore chaos because we love to produce order.

M. C. Escher

I have made a vow to allow chaos to be present in my life.

I thrive in chaos. My desk. My painting table. Each item allows me to mate it with another and another.

Chaos is stimulating. The mating produces new children; new creations.

However, in order to allow the children to grow, I must allow some order into the process.

What is your relationship with chaos and order?

Every day the intelligent person learns something new,

but every day the wise person gives up some certainty.

Buddha

What are you certain about? Are you sure?

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist,

the king of artists would be the photographer.

It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

James McNeill Whistler

In what ways did photography liberate the painter? In what ways does digital art liberate the photographer?

Some veil between childhood and the present is necessary.

If the veil is withdrawn, the artistic imagination sickens and dies,

the prophet looks in the mirror with a disillusioned and cynical sneer, the scientist goes fishing.

Margaret Mead

In what ways do you peak through the veil that separates your childhood from the present?

What energy and ideas and feelings do you carry from the past?

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet,

it implodes in a great black fart of rage

which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.

Erica Jong

Is there such a thing as the failed artist?

Is there another way to look at the great black fart of rage?

When have you experienced the energy without a place for it to go? What is ferocity?

Don Quixote

Pablo Picasso

Facts are the enemy of truth.

Don Quixote

What lies underneath the facts for you?

The difference between involvement and commitment is like an eggs-and-ham breakfast:

the chicken was involved – the pig was committed.

Anonymous

Is it possible to partially committed? What are you committed to? Do you hold it sacred?

When are you out of integrity around your commitments? How does that feel to you?

What is like when people break their commitments to you?

For the other 993 Quotes Questions & Pondering,

email me for a complimentary PDF copy.

Be sure to place 1001 in the subject line.

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© 2010 Ian Summers - HEARTSTORMING - please visit heartstorming.com for more information on Heartstorming Career Coaching.
Thank you for subscribing.
iansummers@heartstorming.com
+1 610-438-5707