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Some Old Bricks

"Use the bricks of the ruins to build a new castle." -- Unknown

I remember having heard this many years ago. Using bricks from an old ruin to build a new castle. I understood the idea that was being put forth. I've even encouraged any number of people over the course of time to 'dust off and move ahead' using the same allegory. Sort of a more eloquent way of saying "If life hands you lemons..." 

Only now do I somewhat understand how it applies to art, and photography.

It is incredibly easy to have an idea in your head that you cannot seem to shake. No matter how many times you try to make it work and fail to get it right. No matter how many times you do it over and over and still walk away unsatisfied - that idea remains like an ever-clanging bell somewhere in the distance. Just when you thought you have left it to the past, it comes back, wanting to be heard. Here - I have learned - is the key: Perhaps it was not the idea that was weak, but merely that it needed to be expressed in its full form.

Like a butterfly that only leaves the chrysalis when fully developed, maybe that constantly nagging idea simply needs to be realized in its refined stage. Maybe we spend so much time pondering over how to build a perfect caterpillar that we forget that it needs to metamorphose...

For years - and I do mean YEARS - I have had a number of ideas in my head that I had never "gotten right" way back when I had first envisioned them. I chalked my failings up to lack of professional skill, lack of expensive equipment, lack of people to put in front of the camera; essentially I chalked it up to a lack of the tangible resources needed to properly produce the images. It has now dawned on me that it was not that at all. It was merely that the idea(s) were not fully formed. I was trying to "say something" visually, but did not know what. In fact, there was a recurrent visual texture that ran through all of them - but I was spending so much time trying to shore up the ramshackle houses that I did not see that the bricks could all be used to build a castle.

So, after four paragraphs of deliberately vague, obfuscating banter I can now tell you a few things:

#1: Walk through your creative idea again and again - then walk away from it and view it from afar. Never mind what you think you are trying to say; what is it really? In its simplest form - what do you want to create? All of the deeper meanings and symbolic drives can be festooned onto that backbone.

#2: Get ready for the blog, the website, and C.M. Franke Photography to go in an interesting new direction... This one might be pretty big!

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