CURIOSITY CREATIVITY FREEDOM

An extension of ESSAY 3 from TRANSIENT LIGHT, FLEETING TIME.

In my book, I kept the essays to an easily readable 300 words or so, but here I wish to enlarge on ideas around curiosity and its dreaded enemy: public opinion/common sense/common knowledge.

Child, Cat and Church, San Gimignano, Italy, 1985. This image is a consequence of curiosity. I asked, ‘What attracts me?’ Is the austere wall enclosing the local gods a mask for what it really is: hard stone with tiny windows admitting dull light to a cold, dim interior? Were these things warning me about something I was uncomfortable with? Was the child’s innocent dancing with a lively cat a sign of humanity wishing to be playful while ignoring, as best she could, the dank interior, scented with death? Was this innocence versus power?

This is because I know, as do many of us, that creativity is a product of curiosity.
For curiosity to survive and thrive, it must be in the context of liberty,
that the artist must be free to enquire and to challenge totalitarian political instincts
and the inhibiting and judgemental social attitudes/traditions/accepted truths of the mass of people.

ACCCEPTED TRUTHS
These accepted truths are often impregnated consequences
of corporate and governmental control
over education, popular culture and the news flow.
Ideas, attitudes, lofty opinions, moral outrage
are often the manifestations of one or another big lie,
repeated over and over in each news cycle,
in each school lesson and popular TV series.

When my young self (and still today)
lapsed into becoming more curious with my ‘self’ than the world around my ‘self’,
my work would be more narrow,
less generous, and too preoccupied with my private dialogue.
Ahh youth.

It’s particularly difficult for photographers under the age of 40
in the European and Anglo-American worlds
to establish an audience for themselves and to encourage progressive ideas
without having a group’s support (class, team, gang) behind them.
When younger I needed to unravel, if as a photographer,
I should represent other people’s needs or were their needs also my needs?

RECOGNISING A NATURAL AUDIENCE
I realised that my search for commonality between myself and others
was vital as a creative base from which I might play a part.
I would use their needs and wants and my craft
to show what the group’s world was
and how I might help in their attempts to see it clearly.

Creativity, by necessity of its curiosity,
let alone its inclination to embrace the unknowable
outside the polite fog of convention,
is the enemy of the inflexible and oppressive established order.
It is the hobgoblin of acceptable options
and of closed systems of thought demanded by those who control bureaucracies,
rule politics and make wars.
Curiosity, creativity and rebellion were like wolves running in my blood.

That was why I needed to know if I must ask questions arising outside of myself,
even as I knew that I was endlessly curious.
It’s through curiosity that creativity is discovered and alerts the photographer to release the shutter at the precise fraction of a second.
(See THE DECISIVE MOMENT, essay 32)

GUARDIANS?
Western institutions habitually present themselves
as the guardians of individual’s human rights;
but before individuals can claim their rights,
they have to constitute themselves as individual,
to consider themselves such and to be considered such.

This is where curiosity, liberty
and the long experience of the European arts intersect.
They teach the reader/viewer/listener to be curious about others
and to try to comprehend truths that are different than their own.

All the above lead to the question,
if in my curiosity I refuse to make judgements,
am I forsaking moral values in my picture-making?
Does not making judgements imply an ‘immorality’.

For me, judgement is all too often a consequence
of ignorance and prejudice
rather than a careful study of the facts or at least the apparent reality.
The expression: ‘Tell it as it is’,
combined with the plea to ‘never turn away’
both carry messages vital to the documentarist
and to the documentarist’s relative liberty to be curious,
and to show rather than to tell.

But this, we can only do when we are awake:

HOW SING THE WINDS OF EUROPE?
How sing the winds of Europe
moaning squalling across our lands,
dark winds, red winds, deadly billowing winds
buffet and blandish all the uplands.

From Britain the oxygen is tired,
crying 'oh sorry, not today…not ever
so politely settling the moribund veil.

From France the breeze is ordered
Cartesian so ordered, oh so postmodern
forgetting a century it would rather ignore.

And towards Ukraine bleeding winds
like wraiths swarming across our burning Eurasian plains
winds with screams and swinging ropes and snapping necks
torments encyclopaedic with savage pain
torments twisting Europe into complicit sleep.

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