“This can only be followed by silence.”
-Bogdan Radu
In reply to the Ground Glass article, On Fearless.
Silence permeates. Silence purifies. It’s the stillness of an active mind. A peace afforded by focus. But it is never an absence. There is no true silence in the human spirit. Everything is signal. Everything is noise. Everything communicates something. We simply need to decide what somethings matter to us.
“A ‘mistake’ is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.”
― John Cage
Poor craft destroys form. But craft is not form. Form is the final structure. Craft is what’s done to create it. Where flaws in form evidence poor craft, we lose the ability to focus on message. But where flaws in form become craft, we find new message. Everything is as it is. No more, no less. We insert the rest.
More often than not, we edit by convention and create by notation. But the real trick about photography and creation is knowing exactly when convention and notation are ready to fail. It is knowing when the rest that we will insert is on the cusp of change. This is when self is found. When our consciousness intersects with our audience at large, art emerges.
Which is all to say that the question we need to ask is not what was done right and what was done wrong, but what we decide to filter and what we let pass. What we decide is signal and what we decide is noise. As business owners, we filter carefully and pass judiciously. But as creators, we need to embrace fully and see freely. When convention is your filter, it will bar you from discovery.
Love the unpredictable. Love uncertainty. All creations are born of uncertainty. There is no life more beautifully lived than when we need have no purpose to feel that everything has purpose. Treat nothing like a flaw, everything like wonder. Let go of preconception, and the rest will work itself out. There is no loss in love. Only freedom.
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