"Process"

Tonight I'll dream while i'm in bed
when silly thoughts go through my head
about the bugs and alphabet
and when I wake tomorrow I'll bet
that you and I will walk together again
cause I can tell that we
are going to be friends
- The White Stripes.

The first time I saw “it might get loud”, I was a white stripes fan, the second time I watched “it might get loud” I was a student of Jack whites. I have made my boyfriend watch this movie with me more times than any other movie (even more than the big lebowski) because Jack white’s thoughts on creativity push me. I think there was a chunck of time I would watch it every night before bed.

There is a scene in the movie when he is talking about how him and Meg White, don’t have set lists, they just show up and play whatever they feel like every night because he thinks a crowd can smell when you play the same set for every city. And at one point he says (he plays guitar and piano) “It takes me 6 steps to get from the guitar mic, to the piano mic, put it seven steps away.”  in other words, leave room for magic and surprise.

As creative people we all have a process to get from getting an idea to the finished work. The more I hang out with my artist friends the more I realize how different all of our processes are.
That’s what I love about working with Erin. Her process is so different than mine but its strong where mine is weak and vice versa.

I have said before Erin is the kind of artist that has all of her ducks in a row and labeled by size and color.

I am the kind of artist who assumes my ducks will return sometime around dinner time.

I relate with that scene of Jack white where he says “put it seven steps away” I like the surprise ending.

The problem with artists like me, is we rarely meet deadlines, we forget appointments, and are overall annoying to work out the details with. Erin is not like that. If it weren’t for Erin our clients would be so in the dark. Erin makes sure all the details are worked out beforehand because that is her process.  So when I say “oh you know what would be awesome! To shoot down town and then go to this waterfall” she’s the voice of reason saying “you can’t get from down town to that waterfall by sunset” (and we wouldn’t have had I not drove on the shoulder of the road going 90 mph.)  I love that we have started to work out a process together. Where I will say ridiculous things that could never work, and Erin makes them work.  If I am looking up at my ideas, she is looking down with plans and together we make them work.

But the thing Erin and I meet in the middle on is the work itself and where we want to take it. We both want our photos to be clean, correct, and driven by the subject itself not the technology over the image. We both agree we don’t want to get into “fads” and heavily photoshoped images because we want our work to be timeless. Have you ever seen those movies from the 80’s that have those really cheesy intros and graphics? Yeah, we don’t want our work to be like that in 10 years, we want it to be like a classic black and white movie that never goes out of style.  We want the photos to look real because we both heard mary ellen mark say "Reality is always extraordinary" and our hearts melted. You dont have to make people seem really interesting by posing them like runway models, all you have to do is see what makes them interesting on their own and photograph that.

So we have no problems allowing the other person to work the way she works best, as long as the final photos have the same vision. And for that I absolutely love our differences because in the end they make our work stronger as whole together.