The following is an excerpt from photographer Sean Kernan’s commencement address at Rockport College titled And So As You Go Froward in Life. It was published in Communication Arts a few years ago. I've kept the article because it begins to explain why I create, why I seek out new things, and why I get that unscratchable itch to travel the world. It might be a bit long, but it's worth the read!
“…So, through some kind of invisible extra-conscious thought process something happens, and you can’t say what it is. You just see the results. For us it might be a photograph, but it could be a painting or a performance, or some poetry or a sequence of film. And when you experience what making it does in you—that can change everything.
It certainly changed me. I was working in a theater right after college. It was a new theater, so it ran on pure intensity, and I threw myself into it day and night for two years. It was great, but after 24 months of this, I was completely burned out. On my few days off, I wandered away from the theater looking for a place to lose myself. Instead, I found myself. What a surprise!
It was in a room of an old abandoned house. There was a window with a ripped, white curtain luffing into the dark. I took a picture.
When I printed it, there was something that stunned me. The photo itself wasn’t great, but it had an effect and a meaning that the room itself had not. It was lonelier and spookier than the room. It was not just what was in the room that made it happen, it was what was in me. And I only saw this when I saw my picture.
How did I do this? I thought about it then and, ever since, tried to understand it. And I’ve managed to understand some things about it, but these slivers of understanding have never helped me to do it better. And I still get my first inkling that a picture might be good when it surprises me. It looks rather as though someone else borrowed my camera for a moment, someone who’s a much better photographer that I am.
I venture to say you’ve all had this experience. Something you have no recollection of doing turns up in your work. You know just how exciting it is. Get a few of these and you can be forgiven for thinking, ‘I could do this. I could be a photographer.’ This is the way these things begin. You make something that says you are better than you thought, larger, wider, deeper, fuller. And once it happens, you want it again…and again. Who wouldn’t?
So we ask ourselves, “How did I do that? Let’s see, I had my camera, of course. And it was five in the evening–that nice light–and I was in a part of town I’d never been in before. And, uh, I was wearing my green sweater.”
So we try to replicate the circumstances. We gather up talismans–camera, green sweater–and a little before five we head out to another part of town…or another country, someplace we’ve never been, hoping for some good light.
But it wasn’t the sweater, and it wasn’t the light, and it was never the camera. It was something else; and here’s what I think it was:
To tell you, I have to introduce the idea of something called the heuristic process. The word heuristic derives from the Greek word eureka, which means, ‘I have found it.’ And it describes a process in which we give ourselves so deeply to the act of perception that we take what we see right into ourselves, and then give forth a version of it from inside, tinted by all of the possibilities within us, transforming the way an oyster takes grit and makes a pearl. Understand that this is a lot more then catching something we see on film. It is making a new thing. And it is this mysterious event that lifts one photo out of the piles an piles that we make, up into the realm of art. And that photo we’ve made, charged with our resonances and possibilities, is what others get to see. But the biggest result is not the picture, it is that after making it, the patterning inside us is different than before; we are expanded by the event.
I’m not speaking figuratively. Thanks to brain imaging, we have started to see something of how we’re changed. When the brain encounters something new, something it has never seen before, its neural pathways shift, and some synapses become more active while others become less so. If someone sticks wires on your head and knows what they’re doing they can see the image of your brain on a monitor. It lights up like a pinball machine.
Then after the stimulus is removed the brain reverts toward its prior state. But it doesn’t go all the way back. It retains some of the new patterning. You create neurons ever time you learn something new as a record of how to do the thing. You do this only when you learn something new. The first few years of your life were completely taken up with this patterning and stretching as you encountered the right light of birth, then ‘mama,’ then ‘doggy’ and on and on. This is exhilarating, but after 40 or 50 years of it, it can become a bit too intense. I guess that’s the reason that people tend to get conservative when they grow older. They want things to stop and stay where they are.
But not artists. They go looking for the change. It feels great to them—a snap of fear of the unknown and a triumph over that fear, something new, then a rush of dopamine to the brain. How many times have you done some kind of new work and felt moved by something odd and unfamiliar about it, knowing that this is—the new thing?
If you feel this happening, the trick is not to try to name it. Just keep it going as long as you can. Surf it if you can. Name it later.
So this is the real and secret reason for wandering around with a camera and an open mind. Making art changes us. So does looking at it. Richard Serra, the sculptor, said, ‘Art has no function!’ He meant that you can’t sit on real art or cook on real art or live in it. But I think it does have one function, which is to change those who make it and those who see it. Of course, it is not the only thing that does that. New arguments change us, new concepts, new people, new places…even propaganda. But artists make the change from inside. They use it to grow themselves. It is exalting, and exaltation is pretty hard to find in the every day.
So there’s a succinct definition of a good day of art for you, the person who comes home from making it is not the same person that left that morning.”
