Today’s Questions with a Pro features the wise and talented Sean Kernan. Sean is a photographer, teacher and writer whose beautiful work and kind spirit are equally well known. Today, Sean talks to us about creativity, personal projects and spanning the gap between the fine art and commercial worlds.
We Asked: You have a wide variety on your resume, from the Kampala Boxing Club to Secret Books. How do you develop these projects and what advice would you give for someone interested in pursuing personal and/or long-form work?
Sean Said: I didn’t take up photography. It took me up.
I was working in theater, on a good trajectory in this creative field, but photography surprised me and carried me off to places far beyond my ideas of where I might go. I have since spent time in prisons and monasteries, on freight trains and slow boats of many kinds, in remote regions across the world. My importantly, I have traveled in the deep recesses of the human mind, heart, and imagination, and photography got me there. I’d like to see any career counselor come up with anything that good.
But it all started with just noticing all the things one notices about the world when one is 23, and then heading off to see if they were real.
I had to make a living, of course, so commercial photography seemed obvious. Among other things, it gave me the means to pursue my other adventures.
I developed into a quite capable, responsible professional, but some instinct kept me returning to where I’d started, to long, self-assigned projects that had no end in mind. This kind of work was my taproot, and I kept it alive, fed and exercised it, even though there were those who argued that it would somehow be more adult to steady up and settle down. I once heard a digital systems dealer say, “It’s time for photographers to grow up and become businessmen.”
Grow up, my ass! Looking around, inside and out, was growing me just fine.
We Asked: How do you maintain such a consistently high level of creativity and what tips would you have for getting out of a creative slump and/or keeping the momentum going?
Sean Said: I think creativity is not so much about making photos or paintings or poems or anything else. That’s crafting, important but not where things begin. Creativity is what happens BEFORE you make something. It’s the flash in your awareness that calls you on, and then you make a photograph…or a song or painting or a house or a film. Or maybe you just enjoy walking around feeling more alive and taking everything in.
But how to get back to that creative state when it becomes eclipsed? My studio and my life are all designed to ease my working process, to eliminate bumps and diversions from my intentions and ideas. So I have to get away from them. I need to go looking for bumps, situations that are unfamiliar and even a bit strange, anything that will disrupt my stately progress.
To be clear, the creative state can certainly arise in the course of making, and crafting often builds on what we’ve learned from previous efforts. That is useful, of course, but creating and crafting are different, and however ephemeral it can seem, creativity is where things begin.
We Asked: Your work spans the gap between the commercial and fine art worlds. What advice would you give for emerging artists interested in both mediums?
Sean Said: Art and commerce—working in either is quite hard enough, and working in both can be tricky indeed. People credit me with balancing them, but I appear balanced only at midpoint of the slide from one to the other. And if I could hover there, I’m sure that any work I did from that place would be bland and flat.
The conflict is that in commercial work we realize someone else’s vision, while art demands that we generate vision from all parts of ourselves. The two require completely different mindsets. When we’re working artistically we want visions that are full of surprises, and those are just the kind of things that commercial work irons flat. We need to understand the difference. You can practice them both…just not at the same time.
My way of separating them is to somehow get away from the photographer I’ve become. A photographer looks around and just sees photographs, but an artist senses hints and resonances that are not visible and then manages to get them in the pictures.
When I got back from a trip to the boxing club in Kampala, a friend asked if I was ever afraid while I was working there. I admitted that there were times when I was nervous. And he said, “Don’t you think that should be in the pictures?” Of course! My anxiety was part of what was happening, and it gave me an alertness that was part of what made the pictures good.
So I looked again at my take, and that nervous energy was there in the pictures. I’d just edited it out. So I went back for a new edit and the pictures became more nervous and more alive.
Commercial photography is a completely respectable profession, and it has always been a huge part of how I spend my time. The list of what we need to learn and update on the technical side is always growing, and there is all the work of managing social media and marketing. And that doesn’t include actually doing the assignments that come to us.
But if you focus only on the tasks of commercial work, you risk compromising your original vision by neglecting it. And our vision is what we are selling, not just our competence. So at every point in your career, it makes sense to keep going back to what carried you away in the first place. The excitement and alertness that comes from practicing artistic seeing makes all your work more lively and complex, more juicy.
And it’s good for your soul as well. So schedule time for it. Treat it as a part of your job.
Because it is.
For more of Sean’s work, please visit his website.
If this post was of interest to you, then check out some of the other posts in the Questions with a Pro and Questions with an Educator series.