On (two kinds) of inspiration:


1
 Poets make much of their experience of inspiration; photographers usually don’t. But, in each art form, two kinds of inspiration actually exist. One was described by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe. For him, poetic inspiration was “a fading coal.” Taken out of the flames it immediately starts crusting over with ash. You need to get the poem down while it is red-hot, before it crusts over.

It’s the same with some photographs. A capture of something evanescent and momentary, a gestalt of subject and light that one excitingly and suddenly sees, is a stroke of inspiration and means everything.


The pained howl of this tree existed for a few seconds only. Then the light moved on and everything changed.

 2

 In contrast, Gerard Manley Hopkins, describes a second form of inspiration in one of his poems. Writing decades after Shelley, he represented two different kinds of inspiration. Catching sight of a windhover at dawn, he sees an instant of beauty like a fire that suddenly breaks out of the bird ecstatically in flight: that is a Shelleyan moment. But then he goes on to end the poem on a very different note, using Shelley’s own image of charred embers in the ashes of a burnt-down fire.

The embers, for Hopkins, do not represent a loss but a gain. They embody a different, perhaps more wonderful form of beauty that crumbling embers at the end of a fire reveal. For a fire’s embers may, he wrote, suddenly “fall, gall themselves, and gash gold vermillion.” Such a moment surprises with a subtler, gentler, deeper kind of beauty than the intensity a red-hot live coal, or a flash of beauty from a bird at dawn, creates. It represents a different form of inspiration.

The parallel to photography is pretty clear. Though some images are captured red-hot, others may only crack open and glow when poked with the tools of post-processing. In opposition to today’s usual (and often justified) sneering at “photoshopping” images, post-processing can uncover meanings and sensations previously obscured in the trove of data of a large image file. And this uncovering, often surprising the photographer her/himself, is as much a stroke of inspiration as is the moment of capture. 


This is a photograph brought out by those helpful tools. For example, bringing out the noisy intrusion of the bus and the dulled faces of its riders and the liveliness of some of the partyers on the fountain helped emphasize, by contrast, the inwardness of the person reading, heightening the concentration of the young reader. Only once these were heightened, did a photograph begin to swim into focus.

Further, the fact that some of them were also reading—not a book but their cell-phones—uncovered a touch of irony that was totally unclear in the unprocessed image. And that these human gestures all took place around the weight and enormous strain of the sculpted figures in the fountain finally emerged as a historical dimension worth pondering.

Often the gestalt that emerges from a file as it is processed is even more of a surprise than what the photographer originally was conscious of. Even Ansel Adams, a photographer meticulous about capture, likened his negatives to the score of a symphony; their processing was its performance.