77 Quotes On Change

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Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on change.
“Some men see things the way they are and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were, and ask ‘Why not?” — George Bernard Shaw
“A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.” — William James
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — Buckminster Fuller
“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” – Charles Darwin
“Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.” – Bertold Brecht
“There is nothing permanent except change.” – Heraclitus
“Change alone is unchanging.” – Heraclitus
“Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
“Change is inevitable. Change is constant.” – Benjamin Disraeli
“Change brings opportunity.” – Nido Qubein
“Change in all things is sweet.” – Aristotle
“Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Browse The Essential Collection Of Creativity Quotes here. Read More

“Unlocking The Secrets Of The Creative Process – Part 3” A Conversation With Photographer Eric Meola

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Photographer Eric Meola and I share our insights on the creative process in this three-part conversation. In the third installment we discuss the role of chance and surprise in creativity.

EM: In describing how he wrote “Like a Rolling Stone,” Bob Dylan said that he found himself writing what he called “this long piece of vomit, 20 pages long.”

“And out of it,” he recalled, “I took ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and made it as a single. And I’d never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me.”

If nothing else, Dylan has always been incredibly prolific. “Practice, practice, practice,” says Bruce Springsteen. And then one day there’s your father’s image “Galaxy Apple.” Is that part of what process is about … the yin and yang between chaos and discipline?

JP: Process is how you get there. It doesn’t just happen. And it unfolds through time. The final results may have come quickly, but it took a long time for Dylan to get into the specific state of flow that would produce his song. The same is true for everyone, including photographers.

This reminds me of a time when I introduced a friend of mine to my father. He said, “Oh, you’re that photographer. Gosh I’d like to have your career. All those 1/125ths of a second. What’s that add up to? A 20-minute career?”

Dylan’s statement, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,” seems related to Picasso’s “It takes a long time to grow young.”

EM: And Dylan as a teenager in Hibbing, Minnesota, used to listen all night to Hank Williams and Little Richard on the radio—it was all part of the “process” of gearing up for “Bringin’ It All Back Home.”

You mention using a Spirograph as a child to make circles, ellipses and various radiating designs. And some of these patterns continue to show up in your latest imagery. How important is a sense of wonder to photography, or any art form?

JP: How important is a sense of wonder to a life well lived? I think it’s essential. Keeping our sense of wonder alive and well increases our openness, curiosity, sensitivity, perception, playfulness, passion, pleasure, and many other positive benefits. This is related to keeping our inner child or the childlike (not childish) aspects of ourselves active and vibrant.

EM: We’ve discussed chaos versus discipline in art. What about a happy accident—serendipity? What role does “chance” play in process? In the film Pollock, Ed Harris shows Jackson Pollock stumbling onto the process for his drip paintings. Do you ever look at something you’ve done or have been thinking about and suddenly make a leap to a concept that had not occurred to you before? I’m also thinking of Kubrick’s famous visual metaphor early in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the ape throws a bone that morphs into a rotating space station.

JP: There are two questions here. My answer to both is yes …

Read the rest of Part 3 here.

Read Part 2 here.

Read Part 1 here.

Read my conversation with Eric Meola about Eric Meola here.

Preview my ebook Process here.

Find out about my exhibit Process here.

33 Quotes On Simplicity

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Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes on Simplicity.
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” ― Confucius
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” ― Henry David Thoreau
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.” ― John Maeda
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” – Hans Hofmann
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” ― E.F. Schumacher
“Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.” – Edward Tuft
“Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.” – Alan Perlis
“Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.” – Martin H. Fischer
“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – Steve Jobs
“Simplicity is the outcome of technical subtlety. It is the goal, not the starting point.” – Maurice Saatchi
“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
“The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.” – Edward Teller
“The simplest things are often the truest.” – Richard Bach
“A vocabulary of truth and simplicity will be of service throughout your life.” – Winston Churchill
“Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.” ― Isaac Newton
“Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy” ― Isaac Newton
“As I grew older, I realized that it was much better to insist on the genuine forms of nature, for simplicity is the greatest adornment of art.” – Albrecht Durer
“I am not a genius, I am just curious. I ask many questions. and when the answer is simple, then God is answering.” ― Albert Einstein
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein
“The greatest ideas are the simplest.” ― William Golding
“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.” ― Leo Tolstoy
“Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.” – Bruce Lee
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
“Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity.” – Plato
“Simplicity is the glory of expression.” – Walt Whitman
“In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” – William of Occam
“Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” – Frederic Chopin
“Simplicity is not an objective in art, but one achieves simplicity despite one’s self by entering into the real sense of things.” – Constantin Brancusi
“The more simple we are, the more complete we become.” ― August Rodin
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” ― Jack Kerouac
View The Essential Collection of Creativity Quotes here.
Discover more quotes daily in my Twitter and Facebook streams.

How A Just Few Words Can Change Your Perception / Photography – Sean Kernan

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Looking into the Light_Cover_smaller

An exercise too late for the book Looking Into The Light.

“I write to find out what I have to say.” Charles Wright

That’s how creativity works. You can try to conceptualize it all you want, but when you begin, it starts to come out completely different … if your lucky. Even if you do it all wrong, you learn more than you ever would by thinking.
That’s why exercises function as the heart of my workshops, and new ones occur to me all the time, so many that I never get to a fraction of them in a class.
The best of them literally take you beyond yourself. When that happens, you suddenly wake up way past whatever it was you thought you were going to do.  You’re like a kid who is learning to ride a bicycle and looks back to see the parent you thought was running beside you and steadying you standing 50 yards back and grinning. And you realize that you’ve been riding your bike and balancing just fine on your own.
That’s what I want out of an exercise.
This summer an idea came to me in the middle of a workshop. I told people to go out, wander around, and make photographs of a place where something had happened. That was it.
My thought was that at least it might get people to really pay attention and just be where they were, see the light, the energy, see what the place felt like. Then they could make some pictures.
So off they went to spend a rainy afternoon working this out, and the next morning we gathered to screen the pictures. When the first ones came up I got a surprise. People had actually written down the thing that they felt might have happened. And the things they had written down completely charged the pictures, and ignited the classes imaginations. They were like short clips from films, and they made you want to see the rest of it.
Here’s one. You’ll see what I mean.
Picture 1_Michelle Elloway
 

Michelle Elloway

I think this one with the swings was the first up, and the menace and sadness that grew out of the picture of these children’s playthings was palpable. Everyone felt the dark possibilities in it.
Here are a few more …
Picture 2_Antelo Devereux

Antelo Devereux

Picture 3_Kemal Berk Kocabagli

Kemal Berk Kocabagli

What I loved about what people did was that they took ordinary situations into their imaginations and made the pictures suggest stories without telling them. They left plenty of space for viewers to complete them in their own minds.  We all became participants.
So there it is, the perfect kind of exercise. It was kind of like finding a mushroom with a note that said Eat me. Whenever that happens … eat the mushroom!
Find out more about Sean Kernan’s ebook Looking Into The Light here.
Find out more about Sean Kernan here.

Sean Kernan’s new book won’t tell you what to see, but it can show you new ways to look.

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Looking into the Light_Cover_smaller
“Years ago I stumbled on what felt like a secret door into creativity in photography. The secret is that photographers don’t need to hope that creativity will turn up. It’s there in us. Creativity is not something we do, it’s something we are…all the time.” says Kernan.
“Sean Kernan has spent more than 30 years investigating ways that photographers find and use creativity. And all that insight now fills a workshop-in-a-book, Looking into the Light: Creativity and Photography, now available as an iBook.
Kernan’s book offers ways to get to that creativity for photographers at every level, bright beginner to jaded professional. It looks past cameras and technique to focus on our awareness. “We work on our awareness of all the things that happen before the click, which I’m convinced is where the wonder of our best seeing comes from.”
The book gives a series of concrete assignments that stimulate the visual imagination and change our pictures. The sign that they’re working is when we get a hit of the excitement we felt the first time we took a photograph that was way beyond anything we thought we could do.
The exercises are gathered from many areas—music, theater, writing—and they all involve simple things we already know how to do. We can use them to make better photos, or just to see more deeply into what is around us. The goal is to make pictures that talk to the world, not just to other photographers. As Jay Maisel put it, “You want to take more interesting pictures? Be a more interesting person!”
Looking into the Light illustrates the exercises with work from a distinguished group that includes John Paul Caponigro, Greg Heisler, Cig Harvey, Jay Gould, Dennis Darling, Adam Arkin, poet Gregory Orr, Ed Young, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Sol LeWitt, William Kentridge, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. There’s an iconoclastic essay on portraits by Duane Michals and links to interviews with Duane and Robert Frank.
To support reader’s efforts, the author has created a companion website at www.lookingintothelight.com, where readers can find further articles, watch instructive videos, and upload and share their own work on the assignments.”
Read 20 Questions with Sean Kernan here.