Let me preface this post by saying it's close to impossible to take photos of photographs behind glass on the wall in a museum. Nonetheless, I tried.
Last week I visited the Ansel Adams exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston twice. Once by myself and once with my family.
Here are a few photos from the exhibit — which mixes Ansel Adams' work with lots of work by other photographers — before him, contemporary to him, and after him — who deal with similar photo subjects:
As I wandered through the exhibit I had that famous Ansel Adams quote running through my head: "You don't take a photograph, you make it." He actually has multiple quotes around this idea. One of my faves: “You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”
I'm taking two things away from these statements:
- Being a good artist is about more than a studio practice. Yes, that's vital. But your artwork is informed by the life you lead outside of the studio. One of my 2019 resolutions is less screen time. I lay in bed yesterday and read two chapters of a book instead of scrolling through my phone. It was great. In order to generate new ideas, it's so vital to live a life!
- You don't find time for art. You make it. My other 2019 resolution is to make art every single day. Not anything so lofty as finishing a piece of art of every day, but just to make something every day. I'll be posting my progress daily in my instagram stories. And I'm sure that I'll be sharing some of it here on the blog. I didn't want the pressure of creating "finished" work — I need creating to be joyful and without performance anxiety.
Thanks for stopping by!
