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Curiosity and curing The Creative Block

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curing creative block

Frame capture from a video project filmed in the Pennsylvania Wilds.

There are many paths that can lead us through The Creative Block. For me, being hyper-curious is method I learned when the block is spotted on the horizon and before it heads my way. It’s a preemptive exercise that helps me avoid being blocked. It’s wanting to know about people, about cities, about places and about other ways of thinking. It’s about being constantly curious and that stems from the journalist in me. Now that the disruptive economy seems to be the standard, it’s a also thought process that has become a daily ritual that helps me adapt and reinvent on demand.

We all have heard or read that “Survival is The New Success.” Even if it’s a bit of a gloomy outlook, there’s truth in that statement. But a disruptive economy is nothing to fear as long as we are willing to adapt. So it’s not just curiosity that we need, it’s a willingness to adopt a different mindset as professional storytellers. And that’s where using creative methods fueled by curiosity comes into play.

Being creative is most often thought of in visual art-based professions to be about fundamentals. Like how we apply rules of composition, use of color, light…so lots of things. But at a different level, it’s about generating ideas and the uniqueness of an image, idea or a story.

So now that curiosity is part of my daily routine I revisit old projects that have been completed. Is there something I missed and can I bring new life to it? And can I find ways to monetize them again? If we dig up those remnants, we can often find unexplored aspects and give them new life. But that’s only part of the equation. There’s plenty of new work to pursue and how do we find that sidebar within the main narrative.

A perfect example is when we started working on the documentary Beyond the Breaker. We had to dive into a foreign culture and again experience what happens often with documentary work. We can start in one direction and discover the most interesting story was elusive and buried in the details that we had yet to discover.

So besides our crash course into coal and how its extraction shaped that region for generations, especially in the context of cultural identity, we also learned about the legacy environmental problems that continue to plague Pennsylvania. There are over 5,000 miles of dead streams in Pennsylvania due to acid mine drainage.  We learned that from EPCAMR whose purpose is to map and clean the waterways affected by mining. But we also learned about coal mine fires. Centralia is a pop-culture destination and the unfortunate tourist attraction. But it’s only one of approximately 80 sites (no one really knows the exact number since these fires are out of sight/mind) in Pennsylvania that have either underground fires where coal seams will burn for hundreds of years, or bank fires that stress the surrounding communities. (Culm banks are those low altitude mounds of mining waste that look like small black mountains scattered throughout Pennsylvania’s landscape).

So where does being creative come in to play? We decided since there already were several films about Centralia, one of the latest, Centralia: Pennsylvania’s Lost Town directed by our colleague Joe Sapienza, we needed a different focus rather than revisiting the stories of the people who once lived there. And upon discovering there are many more coal fueled fires not just in Pennsylvania, or the U.S., we learned mine fires are a world-wide issue.

That led us to create a short film title Scorched that’s making its way around the film festival circuit in 2017-18. There were several goals for Scorched. The main and obvious one was telling the story and increasing awareness starting with Pennsylvania’s fires. A question I had as proof of method was, would our “sidebar” story pass the test of using a hyper-curious approach and yield a creative solution? So far, Yes. We’ve had great feedback, the most important words Tell Us More are always brought up during feedback and post film watching conversation. Lastly, producing Scorched (watch our trailer here) has created opportunities for new work by meeting new clients.

What I’ve learned long ago and what still proves to be effective no matter what you do when technology disrupts us is that we are all hungry for stories. And being curious feeds the creative mind.

For a bit more on this check out Cameron Chapman’s post on Sketchbook for some practical tips.

 

John Welsh is a photographer & storyteller from Philadelphia as well as a director on the National Board of ASMP. He’s a refugee from the land of photojournalism still manages to carve out some truth for his clients.

Growing, Dying, Challenge, Failure and The Business Cycle

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Grow or Die. Scary words, right? They speak of challenge and failure. Those words have been floating around this disruptive digital economy for several years. But they really have always been part of the business cycle. And those words also motive us to create, and the concept of a constantly evolving cycle should become a permanent part of our thinking rather than something to fear.

So is this concept of growth or death actually true? In a feature story by Dottie DeHart & Mary Best, on the BedTimes website (yes, there actually is a business journal for the sleep products industry), they cite business professor Edward Hess‘ book Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Entrepreneurial Businesses as follows:

“Growth can be good and growth can be bad. Bigger can be good and bigger can be bad. ‘Grow or die’ is a belief that has no basis in scientific research or in business reality. When not approached carefully, growth can destroy value as it outstrips a company’s managerial capacity, processes, quality controls and financial controls, or substantially dilutes customer value propositions.”

From Hess’ academic point of view, he’s spot on since he’s approaching it objectively. There is no basis in a strictly business reality. But I feel regarding creative growth, which is essential to our businesses, the concept is absolutely true.

If we don’t surpass our boundaries, stagnation occurs and that causes all kinds of messy things to happen plus it leads to the demise of new ideas and paths to explore. The evidence for this truth is the need to create the “Personal Work” category found in all of our portfolios. It’s also found in the way we perceive ourselves, we are now Storytellers not just Photographers, right? Or maybe we are Producers or Directors.

So use whatever terms you prefer to define the cycle of improvement, but Grow or Die is surely not a concept to be feared, it’s one to be embraced.

 

Previously published on ASMP’s Strictly Business Blog.

John Welsh is a photographer & storyteller from Philadelphia as well as a director on the National Board of ASMP. His latest challenge, other than writing about himself in the third person, is one of extreme growth and involves figuring what it really means to strategize content creation…or die trying.

When It’s Time to Change

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Giving Back to your community, your profession, your colleagues, to whomever – it’s a good thing. It creates community and it’s something we need when facing the challenges within the new marketplace.

But what about Taking Back? It may be more important than giving in this state of unsettling business practice. We need to find ways that empower and let us to play on level fields; ones that allow us to thrive in healthy working environments. I’m not a believer that great art comes from great suffering.

I recently had the opportunity to sift through old letters while archiving materials from ASMP’s founding members. The struggle to be taken seriously as professionals was just as prevalent 50 years ago as it is today. I can’t say I’m shocked that in the early years, those in the business world were trying to define the process of taking a photograph and deem it a commodity. What does shock me is how we are still fighting that battle.

So how can we be taken seriously as image creators? And how can we bring in enough income to live comfortably so we are free from the stresses that block creativity? This has been a common topic since we embraced the digital image and it will continue to be until we learn to navigate the evolving markets.

It’s time to talk about our legacy. It’s time to demonstrate the visual sophistication we inherited from those who came before us and show how our work can float high above the image that’s good enough. Maybe it’s time to resurrect The Print as a deliverable. Even though I’m completely into the technology that enables us to compete, I think paying tribute to the old ways may be one of several strategies we need to adopt.

What am I going to do this fall in preparation for 2016? I aim to educate my clients, to sell ideas, to sell quality and to differentiate my work from what the masses are pumping out on Instagram. Will it be easy? Probably not. Will it be successful, well, it won’t if I’m the only one thinking this way (and surely I am not).

So in addition to working towards sharing photographic enlightenment, I’m going to toss the challenge to everyone reading this and ask what you can do to regain the clout we need as image creators and then tell me about your successes and failures.

Previously published on ASMP’s Strictly Business Blog.

John Welsh is a photographer & storyteller from Philadelphia as well as a director on the National Board of ASMP. He’s a leftover photojournalist who STILL can’t believe the many failed newspapers he worked for actually thought it was good business to give their product away.