The Art of Slowing Down
Being more human in a dehumanizing age
Both Les and I have mentioned slowing down as a virtue when it comes to making photographs, selecting which photographs you decide to show, and determining everything related to presenting those photographs. This slowing down is in absolutely no way meant to say you should somehow strive to be less productive. In many ways slowing down is a way to be more productive while also being more human and enjoying the human aspect of producing and sharing your work.
Taking time to smell the roses every step of the way is in no way lazy or a waste of time. That time means being present at all times. When it comes to making photographs into a tangible art object that exists in the tangible world rather than a bunch of ones and zeros in the cloud be present every step of the way. Rushing through any of it to ”the next thing” is a surefire way not to enjoy any of it and will certainly produce a lot of nothing.
I wanted to highlight a photographer that I find extremely inspiring. Paolo Roversi may not be a household name but he’s certainly an extremely productive photographer that’s been in demand for decades. As far as I know, he’s still working and still extremely productive. He happened to be selected to produce the Pirelli Calendar for 2020. Like many other great artists, his productivity isn’t measured by how many social media followers he has, nor by how many images he makes per second, nor how many subjects he points his camera at per day. Those metrics are metrics for machines not for humans.
What’s more productive, shooting 100,000 images and sharing 10,000 images on the internet to potentially 1,000,000 unknown, unengaged, faceless people in a year or producing 12 images and sharing those to a far smaller audience in the form of a printed calendar and a few gallery shows of those same 12 to a far smaller audience? I’d propose the former is far less human and far less productive. In a way, our primary way of sharing and consuming photographs is dehumanizing. It’s efficient if your metric is how many images are produced and consumed per second but again that’s a metric for machines not for humans.
Why Newsletters?
Yes, newsletters are primarily delivered digitally through the internet but seem far more human. I certainly don’t want to “be engaged with fragments of everything” every second, every minute of the day as much of the digital world seems to think this is a way to live. Email has its issues. Inboxes are filled to the brim with impersonal advertising spam but then again so was snail-mail. It still feels more like something serving us humans rather than us humans serving the machine.
We started this newsletter in May 2021 with the hope of gathering together a community of people who loved photography in the print medium. We kicked it off with a dream of providing a venue for that community to show us their prints and provide a venue for them to be exhibited. We also started sharing some of our thoughts, struggles, and successes in our work. Slowly that community has grown to a number of subscribers we never anticipated.
By internet standards the community is minuscule but the caliber of people astonishes us we thank all of you. We wanted to do more so we introduced the ability to help support us with a small subscription fee. With your generous support, we have been able to produce more with more to come. It’s hard to spend 10, 20, or 30 hours a week while keeping the lights on. All of you have certainly helped us to cover the materials cost of things we’ve done this year with much more to come.
Starting this new year we’ll be expanding our DIY series to every month instead of every two months. We’ll be publishing those the second week of each month. We’ve also been blown away by the response to some of our in-person workshops. We put together two in-person events in 2023 specifically meant for this geographically dispersed community. The first was the Advanced Awagami workshop. The second was the Portfolio Workshop. Both were filled by members of this community within hours.
Looking forward to 2024 we’re in the middle of planning those DIY newsletters and in-person workshops that are of interest to the community based on all of your feedback so far. Ultimately we’ve been thinking and dreaming about things we’d like to provide, blue sky thinking, maybe even pie in the sky.
A multi-day in-person celebration of photography in print. A curated, themed gallery exhibition of your work. We’d like to couple this main event with portfolio reviews, mini-workshops, and plenty of food, fun, and social events.
Physical products that help the “not so handy” elevate their presentation of prints.
An expanded workshop schedule focused on the editorial development of your body of work and the realization of finished work in various forms of print.
Some forms of workshops that are available remotely without losing the personalized, human aspect of the work we do in person.
Heck, I’d even love to do a printed quarterly sharing of our readers' work. I already have the first issue done in my head all coming from the work we saw in those two workshops I mentioned.
Let us know what’s on your mind for 2024 and what you’d like to see from us. Again thank you for all of your support. We wish all of you a happy, healthy 2024. Remember to slow down and smell the roses. Share your work with your local community, and participate in celebrating other local artists as well.