word association

At a creativity workshop twelve years ago, the instructor had us doing a project with word association.  It’s a pretty common workshop activity – you think of a word that relates to something in your life – your work, your hobbies, your family.  Circle that word as if it were a wheel, draw spokes coming from it, and write words that define the center word’s importance.  Then pick one of these second tier words and do the same thing, making it the center of the wheel – and keep going.

You do enough of these and you start to see patterns – groups of words that keep reappearing in different parts of your life.  I was motivated to try this again after reading John Paul Caponigro’s blog yesterday.  What struck me was the similarity of themes in my current life that were present back in the mid 90’s.

Back then I found I was excited by the prospects of experimenting with various film types – the line between knowing what would happen and not knowing what would happen.  The theme was paralleled in my words around paragliding – which I was doing at the time – the confidence and concern I felt jumping off cliffs.  

Today I try not to jump off too many cliffs, yet the same themes resound in my word associations around shooting real people.  The honest, genuine spontaneity you can create that you cannot get with real models, yet at the same time there remains the uncertainty that the images may not work.  Sometimes you find yourself motivated by a caught moment, something unexpected, unscripted and true – this will spark an idea that’s genuine.  Or the risk of nothing coming, the hunt remaining unanswered.  

Same theme, mirrored again with my portrait work.  Utilizing available light becomes a hunt for something present; it’s there and real, yet you need to find it, and when you do, it may change.  Like real people, the ambient light is alive, honest, and spontaneous, yet relying on it for inspiration returns that same risk.

and the visual …

 

scouting images

looking back at my scouting images . should be done more often
/ part assistant portrait, part hey-this-looks-cool
it’s too bad many of these never get seen