How Do You Know…You Don’t.

I’m standing in a statuary hall filled with hundreds of busts of dead humans. How many times have you done this? The problem is that stone has all the warmth of a rock. A sculpted stone rendering of a face is still a block of cold marble. The whiteness, the narrow fissures, the worked chiseled lines; I struggle to relate to a stone human face the way I actually see humans.

A few others casually walk by as if window shopping for purses in a mall. Fortunately for me the tour crowd populating the main hall avoids this side hall. Filled with hundreds of busts and mythic figure statues arranged along the walls, I get the palpable sense that in an era of selfies and TikTok effect, these faces are perceived as impartial, inaccurate, or lacking truth to life. Perhaps that view is reinforced by the fact that in the social media era, there are no commoners in this hall—emperors and demigods only.

I confess that even as a photographer, I’m struggling to relate to what is arguably classic sculpted art. My mind is working to stretch across a time and medium chasm to take in these busts and statues. Regardless, I am walking this hall seeking something that I am unsure is here. I walk slowly down one side of the hall. Nope. Not feelin’ it. When my thoughts devolve to this threshold, I wonder about the wisdom of photographing anything. Forcing photography with this sense feels like eating leftovers. How can this be new or interesting? Here, a photographic concept can fail because art consumption is unlike standing in front of the refrigerator looking for the leftover pizza because you don’t want to prepare a meal.

I reach the end of the hall and turn back toward the exit. Halfway down the other side, something interesting happens. It’s the moment when as an artist photographer I’ve walked to something that makes my feet stop. It’s a learned body cue—a bodily halt command made by one part of my brain that the other artistic part has learned to heed. If I don’t interrogate the halt, I may be forfeiting a gift.

I stop in front of a bust of a face that seems less like deistic beauty and more like modern faces I see outside. The face in the bust is inclined in a side glance, as if the sculptor captured this antiquarian man focusing on something in the distance seen from a window. I turn and lean forward; the bust is titled, Commodus. I step back. An ancient yet familiar story comes to mind. But I don’t have the shot yet. Now comes the interesting part, locating the concept. As it turns out, this is one of the key things that separates hastily captured smart phone snaps from a thoughtfully composed photographic image.

Sure, the camera I have in my hands is way more device than I need to stop the moment. That’s not the point. In this moment, the instrument is not the thing; other times it is. But not here. After a brief period of consideration and auditioning the subject in the viewfinder, I take a shot. I don’t like it. What is going on in the image? A silent back and forth ensues. When I figure out what I need, I know what to do. I adjust, modify, position, press the shutter, and it’s there. But this is the first stage of work because I have no idea—yet, how I’ll go from what I have in camera to an eventual concept forming in my head.

Okay. It's time to move on. There’s a lot remaining, and I’ve come a long way for this visit. As I turn to leave, I find myself rendering a slight nod of gratitude to the crafted marble. Yes, mere rock. But as I once read in a quote attributed to Michelangelo, a long dead sculptor worked to liberate this bust from a block of stone.

I’m back home on this side of an ocean. I’m seated at my computer. It’s work time. I call up the bust image in my preferred postproduction software. The popular misconception is that the final artistic output arrives in a single moment, as if it’s a dark cloud parked overhead asking to pour. Hardly. The only inclination I have is the hazy vision I carried out of the statuary hall. But if the “it” does not arrive, I have to avoid the destructive effects of impatience and cramped thinking. If my final “it” lingers at a distance, I’ve got to build a door that cracked, allows the endgame art to gradually enter the room.

Now, in this moment of creation, the editing must be ruthless. At first, it’s all big initial moves. Then the postproduction slows down as I’m reaching for the “it”—the inspiration which grafted to the vision in that distant hall leads me to where I perceive I must go. Thankfully, an aha moment arrives during the editing. The result? The art is on my site. As original photographic art I am proud of it. But I know a truth that I’ll share with you: any photographic art is not the destination. As an artist I can’t stop moving my feet. Onward.