Artist – In Flow with Otto

Three Essential Artistic Techniques

Published on January 18, 2024 by Otto von Münchow10 Comments

In the book “The Act of Creation” by the Hungarian author Arthur Koestler—first published back in 1964—he writes that there are three criteria of technique in artistic creation. Those are, according to him, originality, emphasis and economy.

Having those criteria in mind when we create, I believe would be useful to anyone of us who lunge into a creative endeavour. Not that we need to have a framework imposed on us when we create, but we can nevertheless benefit from keepings his criteria in mind.

With originality, Koestler refers to the unexpected, that which comes as a surprise. Personally, I am often reluctant to accentuate originality in and of itself. When we seek the original, we tend to become stall and contrived. We simply cannot deliberately invent originality, that is, sit down and cook up something completely new. The original comes to us by being ourselves, creating genuinely out of what feels right for each of us—whatever it is, we are creating.

The original comes to us when we don’t expect it. It suddenly appears from the subconscious after we have put work into a project and after a certain incubation time. Suddenly we see the connection that we have been searching for. It can happen when we sleep or when we go for a walk or when we do something that does not require intense thought activity. Because it is when we mentally relax that we give the subconscious an opportunity to find a solution.

According to Koestler, the original or the unexpected appears in the intersection between two apparently incompatible planes, dots that unexpectedly become connected. He uses the word bisociation, as a play on the word association, meaning linking up two different planes.

While originality thus is a product of an unconscious process, Koestler’s two other criteria are more related to a conscious approach—not that they cannot be unconsciously spurred.

Emphasise we make happen through selection, exaggeration and simplification. For me as a photographer that means I want to include within the frame only those elements that tell the story I want to tell and leave out those that don’t add anything to the story. I put emphasise on the main object by making it bigger, focus the light on the object and let compositional lines direct the eye to it.

Using a suggestive approach is another way of emphasizing, according to Koestler an essential technique. Suggestions create suspense and facilitate the audience’s flow of associations along habit formed channels. Koestler points out that all non-essential elements should be omitted, even at the price of a certain sketchiness.

Taken together, this three factors, selection, exaggeration and simplification, provide the means of highlighting aspects of reality considered to be siginificant. However, Koestler points out that emphasis is not enough; it can defeat its own purpose. Ir must be compensated by the opposite quality: the exercise of economy, or, more precisely the technique of implication.

This authentic story about Picasso illustrated Koestler’s three criteria of technique in artistic creation:

An art dealer bought a canvas signed ‘Picasso’ and travelled all the way to Cannes to discover whether it was genuine. Picasso was working in his studio. He cast a single look at the canvas and said: “It’s a fake”.

A few months later the dealer bought another canvas signed ‘Picasso’. Again he travelled to Cannes and again Picasso, after a single glance, grunted: “It’s a fake”.

“But cher maître”, expostulated the dealer, “it so happens that I saw you with my own eyes working on this very picture several years ago”.

Picasso shrugged: “I often paints fake”.

The last sentence is both original, emphatic and implicit. Picasso doesn’t say: “Sometimes, like other painters, I do something second-rate, repetitive, an uninspired variation on a theme, which after a while looks to me as if somebody had imitated my technique. It is true that this somebody happened to be myself, but that makes no difference to the quality of the picture, which is no better than a fake; in fact you could all it that—an uninspired Picasso apeing the style of the true Picasso.”

None of this was said; all of it was implied.

Would you like to get motivating thoughts related to the act of photographing? Every once a month I write Sideways—nuggets of inspiration on photography. Sign up to receive Sideways in your email.

Photo Workshops and Tours Spring 2024
These are the photo workshops I and Blue Hour Photo Workshops plan for the coming spring.

“The Personal Expression”—a weekend in Bergen, Norway with focus on how to develop your personal, photographic expression. May 3rd to 5th 2024.

“On the Path of Cold War Memories”—a very special workshop exploring Berlin in a historic light. Go back in time to when there were two Germanies and two Berlins. May 12th to 17th 2024.

Are you interested in developing your photographic skills? Do you like to travel? Do you want to make your photos tell a story in a much stronger vocabulary? Find your own expression? Develop your vision and become more creative? Any of these workshops would take your photography to the next level. I promise you, you will be in for an amazing experience. Click any of the links for more info.

Goodbye Artist

Published on August 12, 2023August 13, 2023 by Otto von Münchow25 Comments

Is photography art? Should we even care? What is art, anyway?

But first: Now that the summer is slowly coming to an end, I hope you have been able to enjoy this life-endorsing season. As for myself, I have been fortunate enough to venture out on many outdoor trips—in mountains, in forests as well as on the sea—and I have read a lot.

It’s the latter I want to write about in this blog post—or what it has lead to. Among other texts, I have read lots of articles, debates, talks and comments from old masters of photography. As so, an address delivered by Paul Strand at the Clarence White School of Photography in 1923 has dramatically changed the way I see myself as a photographer, my view on art and maybe even my photography (though the latter remains to see, I guess) .

That may seem as quite the exaggerated statement, but hear—or read—me out.

Paul Strand was a trend-setting, American photographer in the beginning of the previous century. According to Wikipedia, he, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form at the time. As to this day, he is still one of the most recognized artists in the pantheon of photographers. However, he might just have disagreed with this very characterization himself. Or not cared.

Photography has always been a stepdaughter of art. As much as it is recognized as one of many art forms today, it’s still not fully on line with the classic arts such as painting, music, sculpturing, etc. Work by the old masters of photography, such as Paul Strand, are sought after and sold at extremely high prices on auction—but they are still far from what the old masters of the classical disciplines—such as Picasso and Miró, contemporaries of Strand—achieve.

As for myself, as a photojournalist and a documentary photographer, I have always been reluctant to call myself an artist. It just seemed too pretentious. The last many years, though, I have slowly changed my perception and gradually come to terms with myself doing work that is more artistic. In the end, it comes down to a desire to create more personal work—work that could be called art photography.

Now then, in from the past, comes Paul Strand.

In the aforementioned address, he talks to the students of photography (and a hundred years later to me) about what is required to become a photographer: “It involves, first and foremost, a thorough respect and understanding for the particular materials with which he or she is impelled to work, and a degree of mastery over them, which is craftsmanship. And secondly, that indefinable something, the living element which fuses with craftsmanship, the element which relates the product to life and must therefore be the result of a profound feeling and experience of life.”

While craftsmanship is relatively easy to learn, this indefinable something, according to Strand, can’t be taught or given, but develops within yourself by what he calls a free way of living. By that, he means free of conventions, free of other opinions, free of already existing ideas, and not the least free from whatever art is defined as, and, more to the point, free from wanting to become an artist. What is art anyway? Nobody can precisely define it and as it has gotten used in an ever broader meaning, it has at the same time lost its meaning.

“This wanting to be what may truthfully be called an artist, is the last thing in the world to worry about. You either are the thing or you are not.”

Strand has but no respect for the so-called art photographers of the time. At the beginning of the 19th century, pictorialism was the fashionable style. For Strand, this way of making photographs was dishonest, trying to turn photography into something, which it is not, giving it a painterly feeling. He saw it as means to be accepted in what he calls the polite society of artists. These “artists” were doing photography in lack of enough talent to become good painters.

He wants the future photographers he is talking to, to be free, as described above. They should photograph with honesty, honest to themselves. He encourages them to photograph and experiment on their own accord, free from whatever has been or will be installed in them from previous photographers, schools and the future. More than anything, he urges them to forget about art.

“If you really want to paint, then do not photograph, except as you may want to amuse yourself along of the rest of Mr. Eastman’s customers [Eastman was Kodak’s founder]. Photography is not a short cut to painting, being an artist, or anything else.”

Photographers should not try to “make” art, but rather capture good photographs. In doing so, “there are no short cuts, no formulae, no rules, except those of your own living.”

Be as good a photographer as possible, forget being an artist. That is in essence Paul Strand’s message.

He was not alone in this assessment. The same year Edward Weston, another of the modernist photographers of the 19th century, in an interview in New York Times said something alike: “I don’t care about making photography an art. I want to take good photographs. I’d like to know who first got this idea in his head that dreaminess and mist is art. Take things as they are; take good photographs and the art will take care of itself.”

That’s me now. I am a photographer—period. Like a writer is a writer, a painter is a painter, a composer is a composer. Why care about the artist, anyway?

Would you like to get motivating thoughts related to the act of photographing? Every once a month I write Sideways—nuggets of inspiration on photography. Sign up to receive Sideways in your email.

Photo Workshops and Tours in 2023
These are the photo workshops I and Blue Hour Photo Workshops plan for this year.

”Along the Streets of Prague”—five days in the beautiful city of Prague, The Czech Republic. This is a jewel in the middle of Europe with its historical, cultural and human melting pot. September 7th to 10th 2023.

”Photo Tour in Granada”—a week in Nicaragua for the adventures. We will explore the colonial city and its extraordinary countryside. November 5th to 15th 2023.

”On the Tracks of Che Guevara”—ten days in eastern Bolivia. This is a great opportunity to discover one of the most beautiful countries in South America. October 23rd to 31st 2023.

Do You Have a Spine?

Published on July 2, 2023July 2, 2023 by Otto von Münchow7 Comments

Any creative project, or any broader body of work, needs a spine for it to stick. I am not talking about single images, for instances; photos you capture on the street or in Mother Nature that doesn’t become part of something bigger. No, I am talking about something more comprehensive, such as a photo essay, a book, a film, a concert, you know, whatever you are working with and put together to express something deeper and more profound.

The spine for such a project begins with your first strong idea. You were scratching to come up with an idea, you found one, and through the next stages of creative thinking your nurtured it into the spine of your creation. The idea is the toehold that gets you started. The spine is the statement you make to yourself outlining your intention for the work. You intent to tell this story. You intent to explore this theme. You intent to employ this structure. The audience, the viewers, the readers may infer it or not. But if you stick to your spine, the piece will work.

Let me take a photographic photographic project I have been working on for quite some years and am about to put together in its final form, as an example. You have already seen some of the photos, here in this blog that will be part of it. Already from the very beginning, I had an idea of how I wanted to pursue the project. The foundation for the project is a bunch of farm ruins that are spread over a small area in a bottom of a valley very close to my home city Bergen in Norway. Often times I have wandered around these ruins—and felt a tremendous draw by them. I can feel the harsh existence it would have been to make a living here back hundreds of years when the small farms were still inhabited. Even more so, I almost feel at home, as if I had once lived this life. Yes, this sounds high-flying and even daft, but nevertheless it’s how I feel every time I wander around in the ruins.

That feeling is the foundation of the photo project. Then I have nurtured the idea and elaborated how to convert that feeling into something more tangible. I wanted to pursue a threefold expression. Firstly, I want to hint at the life as it was back in the old days, the farmers’ world and how they understood it. Then I wanted to tell my own connection with this area. Finally, I want to express the beauty of the valley the farmers and myself have shared through this many hundreds of years. Only now am I putting the project together, and I have chosen the final outcome as a series of triptychs—images that consists of three panels or three separate photos put next to each other. One of the final photos is then one above. Please click it for a larger screen view.

What I have just described here is the spine of the project.

In my early days of creative fumbling and trying out, I never thought about spine. I was content to receive any random thought floating through the ether that happened to settle on me that day. I didn’t even think I needed a supporting mechanism for the photos I took, the pieces I wrote, the drawings I made. I thought getting lost was part of the adventure.

I was wrong.

Floating spineless can get you through the day, but at some point you’ll be lost in the middle of a project, whether it’s a painting, a novel, a song, a poem or a photo project, and you won’t know how to get back to what you are trying to accomplish. It might not happen in your first creation, which, in your bubble of sweet inexperience, may skim from heart to mind to canvas, page, stage or image sensor exactly as you intended, perfect in shape, proportion, and meaning. However, it will happen in the next piece, or the one after that. It happens to everyone. You’ll find yourself pacing your particular white room, asking yourself: what am I trying to say? That is the moment when you will embrace, with gratitude, the notion of spine.

You can discover the spine of a piece in many ways. You can find it with the aid of a friend. That’s what editors do for writers who have lost their way. You can induce the spine with a ritual. Sometimes the spine does double duty, both as the covert idea guiding the artist and the overt them for the audience. That’s what makes Herman Melvillle’s Moby Dick so powerful and enduring. It has a solid unrelenting spine: Get the whale. Sometimes the spine of a piece comes from the music you listen to. There are just so many ways the spine can come to you or be developed by yourself.

Keep in mind that coming up with a spine is neither a chore nor a distraction that takes you away from the real work of the creative process. It’s a tool, a gift you give yourself to make your job easier. As for the particular quality of your spine, it doesn’t matter how you developed it or how you exploit it; your choice of spine is as personal as how you pray—if you pray at all. It’s a private choice that only has to provide comfort and guidance to you. It’s your spine. Use what works for you.

Would you like to get motivating thoughts related to the act of photographing? Every once a month I write Sideways—nuggets of inspiration on photography. Sign up to receive Sideways in your email.

Photo Workshops and Tours in 2023
These are the photo workshops I and Blue Hour Photo Workshops plan for this year.

”Photo Tour in Granada”—a week in Nicaragua for the adventures. We will explore the colonial city and its extraordinary countryside. October 23rd to 31st 2023.

”On the Tracks of Che Guevara”—ten days in eastern Bolivia. This is a great opportunity to discover one of the most beautiful countries in South America. October 23rd to 31st 2023.

Get Over It!

Published on September 12, 2022 by Otto von Münchow21 Comments

As I wrote in my last blog post, my blogging over the last year or so has been running on empty. It’s never a good feeling, feeling empty. However, all creatives will one day or another experience the well running dry. For writers it’s call writers block, but it’s no different for photographers, painters, musicians—or bloggers.

Julia Cameron, who has written the inspirational book, The Artist’s Way, calls the place from which we draw all our creative inspirations and ideas, the creative well. I like the expression and the analogue it plays with. Like a real well, sometimes it’s plenty full and we can scoop of an abundance of inspiration. At other times, it’s drained and needs to be replenished. Camero suggests treating oneself with something good and kind; if it’s just taking time to sit down in the neighbourhood café and enjoying a latte or treating oneself with a visit to an exhibition or attending a concert.

The thing is, a creative block is not a problem when you see what it actually is. It’s just you running on empty. It’s not about yourself, in the sense that you are a failure or aren’t creative enough. Creative blocks happen to us all—and there is nothing we can do to avoid them. It will happen to you.

The word block suggest that you are constipated or stuck when the truth is you are empty. I so well know from own experiences that the emptiness can destroy the creative soul, as do the shame and frustration that go with it. It can be a very depressing experience. You feel like the muses have abandoned you, or maybe just like they have given you a limited amount of creativity, maybe to do one book, or to photograph on good project, or put together a couple of handfuls of blog posts.

Just remember, they won’t last forever. Sometimes, yes, it will take time to replenish the well, but when you realize that eventually it will refill, it’s much easier not to fall head on into the empty well yourself. Accept the block and fill up the creative well again.

In her book, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes: “We have all been there, and it feels like the end of the world. It’s like a little chickadee being hit by an H-bomb. Here’s the thing, though, I no longer think of it as block. I think that is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have a problem with your door.”

Her solution is acceptance—which is something we’re taught not to do. We are taught to improve on uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given—that you are not in a productive creative period—you free yourself to begin filling up again.

As Lamott points out: “I encourage my students at times like these to get one page of anything written [Lamott is a writer and have taught writing], three hundred words of memories or dreams or stream of consciousness on how they hate writing—just for the hell of it, just to keep their fingers from becoming arthritic, just because they have made a commitment to try to write three hundred words every day. Then, on bad days and weeks, let things go at that.”

Her advice is applicable for all creative activities and all kinds of blocks.

In the beginning, when you are first starting out with some creative endeavour, there are a million reasons not to create, to give up. That is why it’s of extreme importance to make a commitment to finish sections or parts of whatever you are doing, to driving through to the finish. The discourage voice hound you—“this is nothing but a pile of shit”. What you are doing may just be practice. But this is how you are going to get better, and there is no point in practicing if you don’t finish.

Want to get motivated? And are you interested in photography? Every once a month I write Sideways—nuggets of inspiration on photography. Sign up to receive Sideways in your email.

Be a Channel

Published on July 22, 2022 by Otto von Münchow8 Comments

In photography, as in any creative endeavour, the best we can do to ourselves is not forcing the creative process in order to become better, pushing our creative voice into an artificial direction or somehow become original. None of this will do us any good.

I believe we all, as artists, strive to become recognized or hope our work will be inspirational for others or that we one day will acquire some kind of mastery that translates into a personal expression. I see nothing wrong with such aspirations. That can be a good drive for expansion and growth. When such aspirations take a wrong turn, is when they become the goals in and of themselves, when we try to force ourselves into something that isn’t coming naturally to us. That is when we turn ourselves away from life in the hope of making our creation into a brilliant star. All, but futile.

If instead of seeing creativity as something we need to squeeze out of ourselves, something we have to invent or something we are responsible for, if rather we see ourselves as channels for the muses or inspiration outside of ourselves or whatever you like to call it, the act of creating becomes a more fluid process. It becomes a process that we no longer charge with self-consciously guarding.

I often find my ego gets in the way. I want to take my photographs. As if that is the most important part of my immersion into photography. I the creator. Often, though, instead of going out to photograph, I start to doubt myself. The ego wants to stay put where it has always been. New adventures, new ideas, new anything, is challenging for the ego. But that’s exactly what creating means. So, often when I am about to go out and photograph I hear this internal voice “it’s no point”, “you won’t find anything”, “I don’t have time”, “I don’t have a unique voice”, “I am no good”, and so on and so forth. Writers call it writer’s block.

If we rather see our creating as channelling, we become charged with being available to whatever is channelling through us. To the degree that we can set the ego aside, we can then create freely. We turn into a stream of inspiration. We allow it to flow through us. We become an “open channel”.

“The music of this opera (Madame Butterfly) was dictated to me by God. I was merely instrumental in getting it on paper and communicating it to the public”.

Those are the words of the composer Giacomo Puccini. Many an artist back in those days attributed their creations to God. I am not a believer of any godly realm myself, but I see all this as acknowledgement of channelling. Channelling gives us a gate or conduit to something outside of our conscious self, and to let this, whatever we call it—the unconscious, the superconscious, the imagination or the muse—to talk to us. Thus, being creative gives us a place to welcome more than the rational. It opens the door to inspiration.

Viewed this way—as a form of contact with something larger than ourselves—creating does not remain an ego-centred activity we are doing by our brilliantly selves. It does not remain something that must be protected from life. It becomes, instead, a part of life, a cooperative pas de deux rather than a star turn.

It is possible to create out of the ego. It is possible, but it is also painful and exhausting. Ego wants to take credit. “This is my creation”. But then it starts to flood the consciousness with all the flaws and lack of originality in whatever you create and raises fear in you, that whatever you are doing isn’t good enough. Perfect is the only standard for the ego.

If we see creativity as channelling, creativity is no longer our business. It is given, not something to be aspired to. It is, instead, a natural function of our soul. When we open ourselves to something greater than ourselves working through us, we paradoxically open ourselves to our own greatest selves.

When Stealing Is OK

Published on June 20, 2022June 5, 2022 by Otto von Münchow10 Comments

In a couple of post last year, I have brought up some thoughts about what it takes to develop as a photographer. In Starting with the Box I made a point of needing both creative thinking and learning the craft. And in the post Become a Better Photographer, one of the advices I suggested was looking to other photographers.

Let me take this a step further. Because what better way to develop your photography, both inspirationally and technically, than to learn from other photographers? To push it even further: Steal from any photographer whose work you like. Yes, steal (and this goes not only to photographers but to all creatives). I know, you have been told that steeling is bad and dishonest. But stay with me a little longer.

My point is that we all learn from each other. And how do we learn? By stealing. All artists steal from each other. As the singer and songwriter David Bowie put it: “The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.” Anyone working creatively—any artist—asks; where do you get your ideas? The honest answer is; I steal it. In the delightful and very inspiring book Steal Like an Artist, the artist and writer Austin Kleon puts it bluntly: “When you look at the world this way [that all ideas comes from stealing], you stop worrying about what’s ‘good’ and what’s ‘bad’—there’s only stuff worth stealing, and stuff that’s not worth stealing. Anything is up for grabs.”

The thing is; nothing is really original. Everything has already been done—as I wrote in my post Originality long time ago. The point is: what makes something different and yours, is your take on it. Yes, steal, but add yourself in the process. Or steal to learn before you are able to impose your own vision on it, and then start make you own expression of an old idea.

The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something “original”, nine out of ten times they just don’t know the reference or the original sources involved. What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before.

The filmmaker Jim Jarmusch puts it this way: “Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that, which speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.”

Austin Kleon suggests that you collect all, which inspires you in a scrapbook. Thoughts, phone calls, favourite passages out of books, and cut and past things you see around you that speak to your soul. See something worth stealing? Put in the scrapbook. Then use this book when you need inspiration.

At the end of the day, what this leads up to is getting around the simple fact that nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying—by stealing. I am talking about practice here, not plagiarism—plagiarism is trying to pas someone else’s work off as your own. Copying is about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.

At some point, you’ll have to move from imitating your heroes to emulating them. Imitation is about copying. Emulating is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing. Then you start to ask the question, what can you add—that only you can add—that makes it different?

All artists think and has worked like this. “We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice. And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you.” That’s the words of the great filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola.

So: Steal. But add yourself into the process! Eventually.

By the way, if you feel like you are running out of ideas and are in a creative rut, I strongly recommend the before mentioned book Steal Like an Artist. It’s a quick read and full of positive energy.

Learn to Live with Self-Doubt and Fear

Published on March 22, 2022March 22, 2022 by Otto von Münchow21 Comments

Self-doubt. Fear. Insecurity. Inadequacy. Not being good enough. Marginalization. Disempowerment. Depression. Despair. Cynicism. Egotism. Have you ever felt your artistic attempts are not good enough? You feel you lack talent and can’t express what you really want?

Trust me when I say we all do. Even the best and most talented artists do. It’s part of being creative and as such, I believe it’s actually a good sign. If you didn’t doubt yourself and your creative attempts, it only shows that you are standing still and not challenging yourself. As I have written many a time, challenging yourself is crucial for all creative development.

Here is the thing: Trying to express ourselves creatively in any art form, will place us squarely in the sights of our fears, doubts, and insecurities. It reflects back to the inherent quality of any creative art and their insistent necessity on going inward. Remember, in art, we express ourselves. Our only hope to be successful in art, any art form, is to learn to be unerringly what we are, flaws and all. We cannot destroy our demons all at once, but can accept our circumstances as part of our unique identity.

Everything that you are is fodder for your creative work. Do not run; do not hide from your gifts, your shortcomings, and your background. Make them part of your creative approach.

Each of us arises from our own blend of circumstances and has unique gifts. There is nothing new under the sun to art. Therefore, your unique vision and expression can only grow authentically from yourself. There’s no one else on earth with your particular mixture of talents, gifts, obstacles, fears, inadequacies, and unique insights.

Words from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke comes to mind. In his book Letters to a Young Poet, he writes: “You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart.”

From this quote, you can substitute “write” with any artistic pursuit that refers to you. Go into yourself, no matter what you do. With that comes self-doubt and fear. But it’s part of who and what you are.

Thus, take a hold of your vision. It’s yours and yours alone. Don’t try to be good, just try to be real. Each person has some genuine place of genius in their constitution, and you are not going to find it by trying to please others: teachers, parents, admission committees, or peers. Trust your own process. Take responsibility for everything that you are or are not. Your joys, struggles, trials and tribulations, longings, obsessions, and passions are all fair game for your creative exploration.

Photo Workshops and Tours in 2022
Now that the world seems to return to some normalcy and slowly opens up again, I and Blue Hour Photo Workshops hope to get our photos workshops going again.

“The Personal Expression”—a weekend in Bergen, Norway with focus on how to develop your personal, photographic expression. June 10th to 12th 2022.

”Telling Stories with the Camera”—five days in the beautiful village of Bleik in Northern Norway. A dream spot for any photographer. The focus will be on storytelling and the visual language. September 21st to 19th 2022.

”Photo Tour in Granada”—a week in Nicaragua for the adventures. We will explore the colonial city and its extraordinary countryside. November 5th to 11th 2022.

Creativity Is Being Alive

Published on February 21, 2022 by Otto von Münchow33 Comments

Have you pondered about why you have this desire to create? In asking, I take it you are pursuing creativity in one form or another—otherwise you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog. I also presume you find some pleasure in creative endeavours, again, in whatever shape and form you fancy.

Plenty enough people think that art and creativity is for pleasure only. It’s something some people do when they have enough time to spare and don’t need to brawl for survival. It’s an activity out of luxury. Those who create do it for some pretentious urge of self-expression. These people may think the world would go on without art and creativity for its own sake.

I think not. I think being creative satisfies a basic instinct in most people—if they haven’t shut that door completely down. Yes, biologically, our basic needs are threefold and quite mundane. Being able to find food, having a habitat to thrive in and, finally, being able to reproduce. However, there is more to life than these bare needs. One such is the drive to make.

When I create, I am happy. But it’s more than that. I feel in touch with something bigger. I immerse myself in a sea of ideas and inspirations and a void of unlimited wonders—a path in which nothing is fixed or set. Everything is possible. What more is, something tangible comes out on the other side. In creating, I make something, something of which is all my making. It makes me feel alive. I live when I make.

Why are human beings driven to make?

There is a mundane answer, which is we need to expand and develop—which we do by making—in order to survive the threatening world we find ourselves in, whether back when we were hunter-gatherers and needed to protect ourselves from saber-toothed tigers or now as the contemporary human needing to solve the climate crisis (albeit induced by ourselves).

But there is something more fundamental to it.

Since the beginning, the universe has bend towards entropy—ever more chaos and disorder. Every act of creation on our part is an act of defiance in the face of that evolving disorder. It’s almost like an intuitive response, long before science gave us the language to understand what universe and entropy mean.

When we pick up a paintbrush, or compose elements through our camera viewfinders, or press fingers into wet clay to wrestle form from a shapeless lump, we are bending things back toward Order and wrestling them from Chaos.

There is satisfaction in making this Order. But making things is often not enough in and of itself.

We also want the things we make to be filled with meaning. We’re each trying to describe what we know about life, to create a collective sense of “safety in numbers.” When we reach the end of our traditional descriptive powers, it’s time to weave meaning from poetry, painting, writing, dancing, photographing, filmmaking, storytelling, singing, animating, designing, performing, carving, sculpting, and a million other ways we daily create Order out of the Chaos and share it with each other for a deeper and more fluid understand.

Finding “the meaning in the making” is the ultimate fulfilment. That’s bliss and that’s when we feel alive more than ever. Thus, keep creating!

Keep Creating!

Published on January 10, 2022January 7, 2022 by Otto von Münchow60 Comments

In times like this, particular right now, the world needs your inspiration through whatever it is you create. Yes, we need inspiration, something that will give us hope—your art, your writing, your music, your photography, your painting—again whatever it is you create. You can make a difference, not by doing anything out of the ordinary, but through whatever it is, you create.

So keep creating.

I know it is difficult to keep the creativity flowing in bleak times like this. We’d all rather feel like cover up under a blanket or go in hiding, just let things get better and wait the situation out. But I know you have it in you, you are a creative person, after all, you are reading this blog, so please bring whatever it is you create into the world.

You have this gift and it’s full of light and love and wisdom but the thing itself is worth nothing until you make it happen and then give it away. The making and the giving of it is the only thing that allows the gift to keep moving. It is the only thing that prevents that light and love and wisdom and grace from damming up inside you—and in all of us.

You may feel like you are running on empty. The world is hanging on its hinges, whether we look at it with respect to the political situation in many countries, the climate, and of course—and not the least—the pandemic that more than anything inhibits us right now. But don’t let it inhibit you from creating.

We need your art. This world needs your art. But most of all we need you. More than ever, we need people who are vulnerable and compassionate and see things differently and are willing to be as fully, brilliantly human as possible, and it is making your art and having the courage to give it forward that will make you so.

Don’t worry about whether it is good or not. It is good. Because you have made it with passion and love—and that passion and love will transcend to all of us.

It’s a new year. Blank pages. Let’s not let the pandemic be what fills these pages. Let’s live. Let’s inspirer each other. Let’s create. I wish you all the best for 2022.

Photo Workshops and Tours in 2022
In believing that the world will return to some normalcy and open up again within reasonable time, I and Blue Hour Photo Workshops plan a handful of photos workshops for this year.

“The Personal Expression”—a weekend in Bergen, Norway with focus on how to develop your personal, photographic expression. June 10th to 12th 2022.

”Photo Tour in Granada”—a week in Nicaragua for the adventures. We will explore the colonial city and its extraordinary countryside. November 5th to 11th 2022.

A Double Edged Sword

Published on May 24, 2021 by Otto von Münchow51 Comments

Don’t we all have to admit it; that we as photographers or creative persons of some form—at least to some extent—all crave for recognition, one way or another, whether we are professionals or pure amateurs? But don’t we all also know that recognition is a double edged sword? On one hand, yes, it’s nice to get recognized for the work we do, for our effort, but the flip side of the coin is when recognition becomes the driving force for our creativity. Then we stand to lose it, the uniqueness of our vision and expression.

What one day may lead to recognition is ignoring what makes us crave it. That’s the only way we can create from our heart. Without heart and without ourselves invested in our creative work, it only becomes an act of deceit and thus has no artistic or creative value.

What do we actually take for recognition? Money? Fame? Both—when talking about creativity—are black holes that easily destroy us and the uniqueness that sets us apart as artists. Being true to our inner artist may, if we are lucky, result in work that sells or gain recognition—but often not. If money determinates what is good art, neither Paul Gaugain nor Vincent van Gogh were artists worth our attention. But despite lack of recognition, fame and money in their time, they kept doing what they felt they were meant to do. Their creativity flourished and had to be expressed, it wasn’t depending upon recognition.

Only by doing what comes from inside of us, without second thoughts to money or fame, may we be true artists, be true to ourselves. It doesn’t matter if we are professionals or amateurs. Still the professional is often caught up in the money-game since after all he or she is making a living out of a creative field. Thus for them it’s even more important to protect their own integrity and their inner artist.

Often enough I may have to make my editors happy by doing what they want me to do, but still I try to bring my own vision into the equation. Sometimes it won’t work, but then I can always fall back on my own personal projects in which I only answer to myself. And even if amateurs don’t create for money, they can still fall into the trap of recognition and fame. We all want it—in one way or another, no?

As Julia Cameron writes in her book The Artist’s Way: «I must learn that as an artist my credibility lies with me, God, and my work. In other words, if I have a poem to write, I need to write that poem—whether it will sell or not. I need to create what wants to be created.»

The same goes for photographers. Our vision needs to be expressed, whether the pictures sell or not, whether they will bring us fame or not. The joy is really to feel how our vision—our true creativity—becomes reality, becomes expressed. That is the biggest fulfilment, the ultimate satisfaction. The creative process in itself is what makes it exciting. Let’s not confuse it with money or fame. Let’s not slip into the black whole of vanity.