Have you ever been apart of one of those corporate team building events? I’m talking about the ones where you all must get involved even though it’s forced and awkward, and the only team building is the shared despair amongst everyone involved. (well apart from one person, there’s always one that’s overly enthusiastic and as a group you’re all hating that individual as much as the event itself).
Well as part of one of these soul-destroying sessions, I once did a ‘warm up exercise’. We took a random object, I can’t remember what it was but it’s not important – so lets say a coffee mug. We then went round the circle of people and all had to come up with different ways of using the mug. To start with all the obvious things were suggested; to drink from, hold liquid, scoop things, etc. Then we had to get creative to come up with other ideas of what a mug could be used for. You have to stop yourself from thinking of it as what convention dictates and open up your creative mind. It’s the same way that a child might make sense of an item they haven’t encountered before. So, once we stop thinking it’s a coffee mug and start thinking of it as an object, we can then start utilising it in a variety of different ways.
How does any of this relate to photography? Its all about that creative process and seeing the world in a new way. It’s the process of dissociating the objects from what we have learnt they are. Seeing the world from the perspective of a child, or everything as if it’s a new item that you haven’t experience before. As adults, we haven’t learnt what most things around us are and how they work. We become jaded by our knowledge of the everyday, but if we think of these objects as new undiscovered items with no set purpose, then we can get extremely creative with them.
I work in a small and limited area when I’m photographing the seafront and to make new work I run through this exercise every time I venter out with my camera. My thought process very much consists of, ‘how can I make a new image from this same location’ The answer is, continue to look at the location in new ways. Now I have a variant on my site such as weather conditions, light, time of the year, which will all change the location somewhat, but the structure will remain the same. It goes back to that coffee mug – How else can this be used in a new way? That’s the puzzle and the more I can detach the leant knowledge of what an item is, the deeper I can delve into the creative process.
Take away point – I do enjoy team building events if they are done well, I’m thinking more along the lines of paint balling followed by drinks at a bar with an open tab and the following day off work but on pay.
