When I look at photographers’ websites they are mostly built on the stuff they do for clients…you know, the stuff we all do. And there are lots of reasons to set things  up that way.

But often there’s a page called Personal Work, or something like that, shyly tucked away.  And I head right for it.  I’ve found that that’s where the life is. That work is just better…more authentic, more passionate, fuller, richer, more alive.

Some buyers think that if they have a widget job they have no reason to look at your portraits. But the best know that a really good photo of even something so banal as a widget is a portrait. I once showed a portfolio that included personal stuff to a table of creatives. When it got personal, one of them said, “What are you showing us this for?” I knew at once that I would never work with this guy…and I never have. But the others got the connection between what I do for exploration and what they do for work.

I think this is the reason: the ADs and designers we work with are usually artistic types who realized that they need a job. So if you want to get their attention, show work that is strong and artistic. Seeing it wakes them up, they remember what they saw, and who did it. It’s like the Artist’s Secret Handshake.

The trick is to integrate the strong personal stuff with the assignments, treating it as an important part of your work rather than a side line. By doing so you demonstrate that your own vision informs your client work, giving it resonance and overtones. Lots of people are unaware that this is the way vision works, but it does, whether they know it or not.

Integrating personal work into your commercial portfolio has to be done judiciously, and isn’t going to land on everyone you reach out to, but it can make a difference to those people you actually might want to work with.  They’ll get that you’ll go beyond the bare parameters and bring life to their project.

There are a lots of factors that give people a sense of what you can do, but this is one of big ones. It tells people who you really are.

So, if you want to attract interesting projects, show interesting work.

Sean Kernan is currently working to bring a multimedia dance project called The Drowned Man into theaters everywhere…or somewhere, anyway.

The young Piet Mondrian was painting over some older canvases he had done.

“Why are you doing that?” A friend asked. “Those are perfectly good paintings.”
“I’m not trying to make paintings,” Mondrian replied, “I’m trying to find things out.”

We all began by making photographs for no other reason than to find things out, to “see what things look like in photographs,” as Gary Winogrand said. And it it is the  great reason. Then we slowly turn to making photographs that we can think up, or that our clients can think up. But  it is worth remembering that  what really got us going was making those photographs that we could only get to by doing, not by thinking. If we don’t keep that exploration going as a part of our work, our creativity atrophies.

Doing something for nothing lies at the heart of creativity, and creativity lies at the heart of our lives.

Sean Kernan is a photographer and  teacher.

A great way to get inspired and to exercise your imaginative vision is to slip outside photography altogether.

Which is why I recently disappeared into Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry short stories for a few weeks. I lived in the grind and the confusion and the human-ness of partisan warfare. The experience raised lots of questions about myself and about humans and what we do.

Babel is a master at making his stories seem like they were torn out of a larger work…which in a way they were—the Russian Revolution. There is always a sense of continuation before the beginning and after the end of each story. He places a reader in the middle of things, which was just where he was.

Can you do this with your photographs?

Photographers tend to think of photography as fact-based, but we can learn so much when we go looking into imaginative forms. Fiction, in particular, has a way of dealing with atmospheres and sounds and smells, the whole sense of presence that compliments and animates histories. Babel is aware of all the senses at work in a scene…as are really good photographers. That is what gives them their resonance, even if the reader never fought a war on horseback.

So, The Red Cavalry Stories, Isaac Babel. (They’re available in an edition that also has the marvelous stories about the Jewish gangsters of Odessa. Make it a double feature.)

And if this seems frivolous and off-message, remember something: using our imagination  and exercising our vision is part of the photographer’s job, just as much as organizing files and making cold calls. So if it helps you to think of it as work, do it.

And if you want to do something really interesting, try writing a short description of a place you’ve never been. Don’t try to write it well, just write it down. You’ll be surprised.

Sean Kernan spends his time making photos, videos, and teaching creativity. He sometimes acts like he knows everything, but he doesn’t. www.seankernan.com.

Over the course of my career the strongest work I’ve ever done was what I did for myself, particularly in the beginning. I’d be wandering around with a camera in my hand and nothing on my mind (a crucial component) when suddenly I’d see…something! Unexpected, surprising, often a bit alarming. It just woke me the hell up and I’d go after it like a dog chasing a squirrel.

And what came out of these events—aside from my best photos? The thought that I might be able to do this photography thing all the time, make my living at it. My thinking was that if this work excited me,  it might excite others too, art directors, designers. And people remember excitement

So that’s what I’ve mainly put in my portfolio, both at the beginning when I had precious little else, and now. I want people to see how my eyes work. Some people will get it, some won’t. (Of course, I also show work that shows how well I can execute, which is something buyers need to know.)

The thing is that if you put out work that is an amalgam of other’s seeing, then you get asked to do a kind of amalgamated work that is empty at the center.  And that kind of work is really hard and un-nourishing to do. It’s like trying to cook up a meal of cardboard.

So put out the work that you love doing and you increase the chances that you’ll attract that kind of assignment.

Sean Kernan teaches Creativity and the Photographer at Maine and Santa Fe Workshops. He was named Teacher of the Year by The Center in Santa Fe. www.SeanKernan.com

[by Sean Kernan]

Only after Chicago did it occur to me how easy it was to get people  to warm to the subject of my presentation. I mean, how hard could it be to get creative people to stand up and participate in creativity seminars? It was like rolling stones down hill. You just have to get them started.

Which made me appreciate all the more the work done by my co-presenters, who talked about  getting your files archived, making cold calls, and conducting hard-nosed negotiations with people who don’t really fancy paying for what it is they want. Now that is hard work, and they all did great jobs at making their points.

And now, away from the anthill atmosphere of hotels full of others like ourselves, it becomes clear that we actually have to practice all this stuff. Fortunately there are pleasures in getting these things in place and moving. It is kind of like the pleasure of putting on a clean shirt. It is just a visceral reminder that you are looking forward, not backward at messy desks and unfinished business.

So let’s take our freshly-laundered high spirits and put them to the tasks of working regularly at registering our backlog of images, at setting up our archives, at revisiting our work and looking at what we want to put out into the world, at finally figuring out sound for video, and embarking on some regular creative project.

And let’s have some fun with it.

And be aware that this is all there to be done by those who couldn’t attend too.

Sean Kernan teaches Creativity and the Photographer at Maine and Santa Fe Workshops. He was named Teacher of the Year by The Center in Santa Fe. www.SeanKernan.com

The reasons to do it are obvious. The best way expand your thinking is to just do something. I suggest going to Paris.

Not that you’ll think more there. You might even think less, but your thoughts will all be new, fresh. With the micro-gravities (shopping, picking up the cleaning, all that stuff) removed from your life there’ll be room for a whole new set of experiences. Give your mind a little time and it will be thrilled to spend hours forming your new thoughts into a new you. Call it Traveler’s Rapture.

Can’t swing Paris this year? So take the afternoon and head for some place half an hour beyond your usual circuit. Park your car, leave the camera in the trunk (this is important), and start walking. Walk until you’re bored. Slow down. Sit. Listen to sounds. Make up stories about things you see. Use your imagination. Don’t go home for dinner. Stay until dark.

What do you remember in life? All those times when everything went just as planned? Of course not. So take this little trip right now and you can have an afternoon that you’ll remember all your life. And when you come home, you won’t be quite the same person that left.

Assisting is a step toward being a photographer, a way of learning how things are done, how they work.

That’s all very important, but you really need to keep your creative work going. That’s what will really make  you a photographer. That’s where you learn what no one can teach you. That’s where your career will ultimately come from.

Knowing workflow and procedures is important, but not more important than doing the actual work.

The reasons to do it are obvious. The best way expand your thinking is to just do something. I suggest going to Paris.

Not that you’ll think more there. You might even think less, but your thoughts will all be new, fresh. With the micro-gravities (shopping, picking up the cleaning, all that stuff) removed from your life there’ll be room for a whole new set of experiences. Give your mind a little time and it will be thrilled to spend hours forming your new thoughts into a new you. Call it Traveler’s Rapture.

Can’t swing Paris this year? So take the afternoon and head for some place half an hour beyond your usual circuit. Park your car, leave the camera in the trunk (this is important), and start walking. Walk until you’re bored. Slow down. Sit. Listen to sounds. Make up stories about things you see. Use your imagination. Don’t go home for dinner. Stay until dark.

What do you remember in life? All those times when everything went just as planned? Of course not. So take this little trip right now and you can have an afternoon that you’ll remember all your life. And when you come home, you won’t be quite the same person that left.

I’ve been riding a long slow curve from the activity of making photographs through the question of why I pursue it so hard, visiting the question of how we create, and winding up (for now) at the question of why we create in life-size our versions of how everything should be, using photos, movies, novels, art of all kinds, and also our life stories and beliefs.

So my reading list includes:
First, The Making of a Midsummer Night’s Dream, a diary of the rehearsal of the landmark Peter Brook production of Shakespeare’s play. The rehearsal process was a culmination of many inventions in the way theater discovered a play and what was in it, and people who saw the play say it changed their lives. It certainly changed the way theater was done. But the fascinating thing to me was that whole rehearsal was extremely uncomfortable for those involved. No one really had any sense of the scope of what they were doing or how it would influence things going forward. The experience was sometimes exhilarating and more often frightening at the time, and often seemed doomed…until the play opened and the amazed responses began to come in. I usually feel insecure in the middle of projects too, so this book reminds me that that is what I’m supposed to feel if things are going as they should.

Also, Laurie Robertson-Lorant‘s biography, Herman Melville, whose a vision so great and so far advanced, and his insistence on it so complete, that he gradually cut himself off from those around him. Of course, he didn’t know he was writing the Great American Monumental Novel, and that might not have been a compensation? Did he even have a choice?

And Son of the Morning Star, Evan Connell’s reading of the national psyche’s that led up to Custer’s demise and the exploitive mythmaking that followed. I read it as another kind of insistence, that of a young nation forming its identity by pursuing a belief in its own “manifest destiny” and remaining blind to the consequences on others and on itself. (This is something Melville was particular critical of, as he witnessed missionaries and diplomats taking it on themselves to “civilize” the cultures of the Pacific.)

The thread that I have followed through all of these is that there is often—or always—something behind what we’re aware of that is bigger than anything we have in mind, that leads to a much fuller outcome. It can be for good or ill, but it is there. Can a wider awareness harness it? That’s the next question, isn’t it? Anyone know any good books on the topic?

But I have all of Stieg Larsson series in front of me too. Maybe I’ll run a little sidetrack into that next, lest things get too serious. On the other hand, knowing new stuff is fun too.

If you’re not busy enough with work and also too busy trying to find some, try this: volunteer. Take some of that time and give it away.

Be a Big Brother or Sister, coach a kid’s team, mentor a child. take your charming dog to a nursing home every week. There are so many people in this world who need help, and it shouldn’t be hard to reach out and find a few of them. It’s probably best to do something that involves real human connection, though working at some kind of wider-ranging effort like fundraising would be fine too.

When I’m busy at a job I feel energized, but there’s often a little ambiguity in the mix, and I find myself asking if the world needs me to urge it buy another thing. But I know that the volunteering I do is unambiguously right and good. And having one clearly good thing in my life seems to re-balance everything else.

In his book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde talks about the huge importance of the things we pass around our society as gifts with no compensation. We can’t sell love or hope or compassion or so many of the other things that make us human. But giving them away brings enormous returns.