I have decided to start keeping some sort of a journal on my photography. That is what I discovered after accidentally finding Ted Forbes's The Art of Photography Youtube channel and his photography assignments:

https://youtu.be/JB0rtvtmdF8

The idea is to record the creative thinking and flow in some way, in order to reflect one's own work. However, I think I like to utilize modern digital format for it. Although, I much like handwritten journals and diaries, they does not allow such useful features as ability to search afterwards, with words in text and keywords. Moreover, digital text is superior because it makes it easy to copy (for example copying pieces of my own text from here to elsewhere), edit, and share.

On this article I focus on two ideas and topics that puzzled me after reading two challenge assignments where I am personally involved to. First one is Saturday Self-Challenge, where the challenge was to shoot patterns. And the other one is The Sunday Challenge, where the topic was no more and less but Art, and yes, definitely with capital A! So, the idea is to start my journal with these two concepts, and how they are related.

My very first approach was focused only on patterns, and especially patterns that appears in nature. To find some patterns, I went out to local cemetery to shoot barks of trees. I indeed got some rather interesting shots. But when reflecting what I got during that day, and after reading the photo assignment for The Sunday Challenge, I really started to wonder what we take as art, and what art is about. Definitely not the first time for me or anyone to think this, but the very crystallized idea I came out with, was that art is like balancing between repetition and being unique.

What somewhat every artist likes to be is unique. In other words, we all want to come up with something truly original, something that is never seen before. But there lies also a great risk of being way too alien to audience, to critics (including ourselves) and to the whole society. Our whole education actually aims to this. We try to learn how to copy patterns (phrases, images, techniques) that makes our input for the society similar enough to become recognized as a pattern within the larger cultural fabric. And yet we also need to get that piece of pattern look unique enough, to make it look like something new becomes discovered, and avoid for example risk of just copying others too much.

And when going through the images I took at the semetary, I noticed one shot, where I first noticed the "eyes" that I saw on side of an old spruce trees, trees where the lowest branches were cut some time ago. As a living creature we are learned (partly by repetition and copy, partly maybe because of DNA) to recognize such patterns as faces and eyes. In computer science this is called as pattern recognition, where the attempt is to make computers do the same for us: recognize common patterns for example on images. For modern people this can be useful for example in photography, to automatize the camera focusing based on face patterns. For the primitive animal inside of us the face recognition is important to help us recognize the both, the potentially dangerous creatures, and those that belongs to our own kind and especially the close ones (those that belong in to our pack/family).

Kalma

Altogether this is somewhat also the reason why we especially get drawn to images where we recognize anything that looks familiar. It is very much based on this concept of pattern recognition. We become exited when we see a human figure in the picture. And this is probably because it trickers multiple things in our mind. We start trying to find out whether the figure is something (someone) we know, belongs to our pack, or is danger to us, or looks attractive. Then it also may provide us such values as possibility to identify with some of our own experiences in that image, and to reflect our own feelings and believes.

Then the opposite is probably a very non-figurative art where we find absolutely nothing familiar, except maybe some colors, or in a long run, similar works of abstract art. And there we approach the risk of becoming too original and alien. The majority of audience then just "don't get it".

Photography then is a very much as an art form of ultimate copying, and also an attempt to do things in some original way. Which then leads me back to the topic of this post. How to illustrate patterns and repetition creative and artistic way?

I will return to this topic later on, because the idea of a journal is not to say everything at once, but to record one idea at the time, like making a quilt (a pattern) out of small pieces.