drmstream[writing]

I can’t see what­ever you see here. I’m mes­mer­ized by the cast of the eye, the angle of the nose, the gen­tle cherry lips. My heart swells when I stare at the photo and try to deci­pher its aesthetic.

Strange, isn’t it?

See, I know there’s some­thing pleas­ing about the photo. That’s why I’m shar­ing it. I’m not a pho­tog­ra­pher, but I like the short­hand that snap­shots pro­vide to the world I experience.

(A restau­rant we like to go to has pho­tos taken by Alan Gins­burg all around the walls. They are black and white. Gins­burg wrote descrip­tions on the mar­gin in tight black script. The col­lec­tion is com­pelling as art, the pho­tographs them­selves some­times pedestrian.)

But I can’t tell what it might be.

Does my over­whelm­ing love for the boy come across in the image, even though he is in the back­ground, dimin­ished by the vivid­ness of the flower? Or does the photo engage because of fun­da­men­tals of composition?

This con­fu­sion is why hon­esty is so impor­tant in art and creativity.

Are you being hon­est with your­self about what you are doing and why? It is easy to con­vince your­self that you are being hon­est, when you are really being lazy, or falling back on some cre­ative par­lor trick.

For instance, I don’t know whether the photo is any good, as a photo. I do know that I love look­ing at it. And I know that some num­ber of read­ers will see the young boy and feel sen­ti­men­tal long­ing. The halo of that sen­ti­ment will extend to the aes­thetic judg­ment of the photo. A human con­nec­tion will be made.