Late Blooming

I read an essay the other day in The New Yorker—"Late Bloomers," by Malcolm Gladwell—discussing the difference between artists who show their genius right out of the gate, like Picasso or Mozart, and those who work at it for decades before reaching their true genius, like Cézanne or Alfred Hitchcock. Whereas the early prodigies tend to work from a wholly formed concept, "a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they execute it," late bloomers are more experimental, trying things out as they work towards a less clearly defined goal. Late bloomers, therefore, tend to feel like failures for much of their artistic careers because it takes a long journey of trial and error and searching for the questions to ask before they can even start thinking about the answers and maybe begin to find them…

Gladwell's point is that genius doesn't have to happen right out of the gate to qualify. If it takes the whole of your life to figure out what you're trying to express and how to express it, that's just another way to genius. My oldest sister told me a few years ago, when I was agonizing over not being able to focus my creative drive, that she considers herself a "generalist" rather than a specialist. I think maybe that's what Gladwell is describing in this article—us unfocused artists, the Generalists among us, are experimental seekers rather than conceptual whiz kids. We work diligently and tirelessly to make incremental progress toward a murky goal that we know exists, even if we can't define it.

My formal training in photography, in high school and college, was with black-and-white film cameras. Fine art photography is still prejudiced towards black-and-white film, developed and printed in a dark room. Color photos are just beginning to be accepted as fine art—forget about digital! I've argued against that view for the past few years as I began to work with digital cameras and photo-editing software. Digital cameras are new but that doesn't make them inferior. And most of what I did on the computer is the same stuff I used to do in the darkroom with filters and exposures, etc. Which is exactly the issue: Despite my arguments against film prejudice, I was still approaching photography as though I was using a black-and-white film camera.

I didn't recognize this until yesterday when working on a photo I'd taken of some leaves. As I adjusted the levels, a Photoshop tool I've been playing around with for the past few months, the photo suddenly took on such depth that it almost looked 3-D. "That's what I've been trying for!" my late-blooming brain exclaimed. Mulling over this discovery for the rest of the day, I came to see that I'd still been using film camera techniques to try to reveal the depth in my photos: shadows, contrast, depth of field. All of those add depth, sure, but using the color levels adjustment produced the effect I've really been wanting and never quite achieving. Letting my digital camera and software do what they're designed to do well, rather than imposing film standards on them, let me break through to the other side of my frustration. When I looked at those leaves on the tree, what I found beautiful was the multiple layers of color dancing together in that small, densely filled universe. I was drawn into the leaves, deep into them. That was what I needed to convey in my photo. Increasing the contrast, adding film grain—methods I used in the darkroom and have transferred to the computer—didn't do it. Adjusting the master levels didn't quite do it, either. So I went a step further this time and tried adjusting each color level independently, and all of a sudden there it was—I was pulled into the layers of leaves just like I had been outside by the tree.

The layers of meaning in all this for me are these:

1. I need to learn to think of color not just as something painted onto a black-and-white photo but as the true medium that it is. When I look at color, I need to see its full dimensions, not just the lines underneath it, the shadows, and the contrast of values. Those are all black-and-white concerns. Color is another whole world of its own!

2. I need to learn what digital cameras can do well that film cameras can't. Instead of trying out different settings to find the one that gives me the result a film camera would (I can just use my film camera for that, yes?), I've started putting the camera on different settings and pointing it at things to see what I get. And what I get sometimes are beautiful fields of color, or abstract light effects, or an unexpected element in focus, one that I wouldn't myself have thought to focus on but which makes for a great photo!

And finally, perhaps most importantly,

3. I need to stop worrying about whether I'm a "good photographer" or a "real artist" and just let my camera teach me some new ways of seeing. It's hard for me to be a failure—all my life I've been plagued by needing to be perfect right away at whatever I do. And unfortunately I showed prodigy possibilities in music, language, and math, so my early years burned into me that self-image as a whiz kid. Accepting myself as a late-blooming experimental seeker is a big shift. But it's better than fearing I burned bright and then burned out long ago, leaving me with nothing to look forward to but frustrating failures. My whiz kid days are definitely over, but I choose to believe that artistic "genius" is still available to me, the kind that will take me the rest of my life to reach.