More Than a Rock, 2nd Edition: Essays on Art, Creativity, Photography, Nature, and Life

By Guy Tal

A deeper look at the creativity, art, expression, craft, and philosophy of landscape photography.

More Than a Rock, 2nd Edition is a passionate and personal book about creativity and expression. In this series of over 70 brief essays, photographer and teacher Guy Tal shares his thoughts and experiences as an artist who seeks to express more in his images than the mere appearance of the subject portrayed. Following up on the success of the first edition, this revised edition contains updated imagery, a new essay in each of the book’s four sections—Art, Craft, Experiences, and Meditations—and is presented in a beautiful hardcover format.

Tal makes an argument to consider creative landscape photography—expressing something of the photographer's conception through the use of natural aesthetics—as a form of visual art that is distinct from the mere representation of beautiful natural scenes. Tal covers topics such as the art of photography, approaches to landscape photography, and the experiences of a working photographic artist. His essays also include reflections on nature and man’s place in it, living a meaningful life, and living as an artist in today’s world.

The book is decidedly non-technical and focuses on philosophy, nature, and visual expression. It was written for those photographers with a passion and interest in creative photography. Anyone who is pursuing their work as art, is in need of inspiration, or is interested in the writings of a full-time working photographic artist will benefit from reading this book. The book is visually punctuated with Tal’s inspiring and breathtaking photography.

“Some images look like things, while others feel like things; some images are of things, while others are about things. A creative image is not a record of a scene nor a substitute for a real experience. Rather, it is an experience in itself—an aesthetic experience—something new that the artist has given the world, rather than a contrived view of something that already existed independent of them.”
—Guy Tal

“The medium of photography has a long tradition of practitioners who were not only masterful photographers, but were also insightful and thoughtful writers—the thinking man’s photographers. Among them we find such greats as John Szarkowski, Minor White, Bill Jay, and Robert Adams. It is no exaggeration to include Guy Tal on this esteemed list.”
— From the Foreword, by Chuck Kimmerle

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rocky Nook
• Release date: Sep 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781681986852

Guy Tal

Guy Tal spent the first 26 years of his life in Israel where he was born, served a mandatory military service, and studied and taught at the Tel Aviv University. As a youth, he loved to explore the natural areas around his home by the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the Negev Desert and the Golan Heights. It was during one of these outings that Guy first picked up a camera to document the things that fascinated him about the natural landscape and its wild inhabitants. This prompted a passion for and deep interest in photography that continues to grow and intensify to this day—three decades later. At odds with the political turmoil and rampant urbanization of his homeland, Guy immigrated to California where he embarked on a career in information technology. He also began an enduring love affair with the wild places of the American West. Guy found that he was unfulfilled by the urban, career-driven life, and decided to move closer to his beloved deserts and mountains of the Colorado Plateau. He ultimately settled in a tiny, remote town at the foot of Utah’s Aquarius Plateau, on the edge of Utah’s famous canyon country—a place that inspires him deeply and where he practices most of his work. A lifelong learner and explorer, Guy’s interest in art, science, and philosophy converged with his intense love of wild places, which he expresses through his photography and writing. He is a public speaker, educator, and frequent contributor to several photographic publications. Guy’s first book, More Than A Rock, was published by Rocky Nook in 2015.

Book preview

Preface

This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.

—Edward Weston

In our time, photography of natural landscapes is generally aimed at showcasing the inherent, objective aesthetics of natural scenes and subjects, interesting geographic features, majestic feats of light, and other naturally occurring phenomena. The idea of images as metaphors rather than literal depictions—although well established in painting and other visual arts—is often a revelation to photographers, and one I emphasize in my teaching and writing.

The above quotation by photographer Edward Weston is one I mention frequently as a means of distinguishing creative photography from representational photography. Creativity, by common definition, is the production of things both novel and useful; whereas representation in photography, quite literally, is the re-presenting of something already in existence.

In the context of photography, therefore, representation is accomplished primarily through technology, skill, and a fortuitous convergence of right places and right times. Creativity requires something beyond objective qualities inherent in objects, tools, or circumstances—something subjective that would not have existed had the photographer not created it.

To use Weston’s example, a representational image may portray a rock, which might be interesting in its own right. A creative image, on the other hand, must communicate more than just the likeness of a rock, even if a rock is all that is in the frame. Put another way, in creative photography the object is not the subject. Creative and representational photography both require degrees of skill, and both may yield works of great aesthetic appeal. Still, I believe that the pervasive and common failure to distinguish between the two is a severe handicap to the acceptance of photography as an artistic medium, on equal footing with painting, sculpture, music, or any others.

Where most people have no problem distinguishing abstract painting from technical illustration, or poetry from a news report—and applying different modes of appreciation to each—many people still perceive photography as a single category, to be judged by only one set of criteria (most often including fidelity to the original view) and lacking further distinction among genres, styles, and intents.

In this collection of essays I share some of my thoughts and experiences as one who seeks to express more in images than the mere appearances of the things portrayed.

Guy Tal

Torrey, Utah

Introduction to the Second Edition

On one of my workshops a student asked whether I keep notes of specific settings I’ve used to print a photograph. I don’t. This is because every time I open one of my files, I find something I want to change about it. I aim for my work to be self-expressive. By this I mean that I don’t write or photograph just to create some objectively appealing artifacts. I write and create photographs to reflect the person I am, to express things that are on my mind, and to give tangible form to qualities of my real experiences (at least in my own mind). It stands to reason that as my sensibilities and skills evolve, as my thinking matures, as my knowledge increases, and as I assimilate more of my living experiences, I change and my work changes with me.

Henri Matisse said, I do not repudiate any of my paintings, but there is not one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo. I feel fortunate that, five years after the publication of the first edition of More Than a Rock, I got the opportunity to do exactly that: to redo the book with the benefit of hindsight, with (hopefully) improved skill, and in light of feedback from readers. This feedback, to my surprise, is something I did not expect when the book first came out. In fact, I wasn’t sure then what to expect, or whether my words would resonate with enough readers to justify writing more of these essays. I feel fortunate today to be able to express my gratitude to those who not only read the book but also took the time to share with me some of their impressions and insights, and to do so from the pages of this second edition. I am grateful also to the wonderful team at Rocky Nook for their help with the book, and for being a pleasure to work with.

Although I have made a fair number of edits to essays from the first edition, I did so with the goals of preserving my original thoughts and streamlining the text for readability. I also included four new articles in this edition, which touch on more recent thoughts and experiences.

Guy Tal

Torrey, Utah

July 2020

PART IART

1The Mission of Art

It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art.

—Bill Evans

I’ve often been accused of taking my work too seriously. Understandably, many who practice photography as a fun hobby or as distraction from less rewarding impositions may be reluctant to overthink it. As a friend jokingly expressed, why ruin a perfectly good hobby? In truth, I never made the conscious choice to pursue photographic art as seriously as I do, just as I never made the conscious choice to limit art’s role in my life to being simply a satisfying hobby. I just followed where photography led me until I realized somewhere along the way that it had ceased to be merely a casual interest; that it had transformed my life and my personality in ways I could never have predicted and did not even know were possible. I also could not have predicted the depth of gratitude I would come to feel for these transformations.

We all pursue photography because we enjoy something about it—the creative process, the tools and mechanics of the medium, the aesthetics of photographs, sharing photographs with others, competing with others, or some other reward of making photographs. Every career photographic artist I know started off with one or more such motivations, but I have never met any such photographers who, in hindsight, can say they had any idea how such simplistic justifications would ultimately guide the course of their lives. It’s no wonder that those who choose explicitly to not take their work seriously, and who therefore have no frame of reference for (let alone personal familiarity with) where such seriousness may lead them, may fail to understand those of us who do.

Photography has many uses, art being just one of them. Of these uses, photographic art is arguably the most contentious, not only because art often requires venturing beyond the medium’s ostensible purpose of objective representation, but also because art’s purpose (at least to some) is different from the purposes of most other uses for photography. Most photographers aim to convey the appearances of things outside themselves—views, objects, people, events—to people other than themselves (viewers), serving mostly as conduits of visual information. We photographic artists, on the other hand, often seek to elevate our inner experiences beyond just witnessing beautiful or interesting things outside ourselves and relaying to others what they may have seen if they were standing next to us. Instead, we seek to give subjective and emotional meanings to external views, to discover things about the world and ourselves beyond what we already know and beyond what would have been obvious to anyone else in similar circumstances. We thrive not only on being in certain places and witnessing certain things, but also on the inner experiences and rewards of artistic creation and personal expression. We wish to contribute some worthwhile things of our own making to the world, and not just to be passive consumers of things already in the world. In sharing our work, our goal is not to merely convey information to our viewers, but to express to viewers our inner feelings about—or through—the things we photograph; to inspire our viewers to experience their own sense of meaning and discovery, not by showing them what we saw, but by composing and presenting what we saw as to imply its significance to us, or to suggest that it may have greater significance worth discovering beyond just being visually attractive or interesting in some objective sense.

To most, the goal of photography is to make appealing photographs. In a larger sense, some consider the purpose of art simply to make beautiful objects. Lost in such simplistic ideas is the power of art to elevate the lives of both artists and viewers, not just by injecting ephemeral distractions into their days, but by shaping and influencing perceptions, lifestyles, and attitudes in positive and lasting ways.

Friedrich Nietzsche proposed that art offers a means of escaping the innate negative nature of reality. In his words, If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science [. . .] would be utterly unbearable. Albert Camus, on the other hand, proposed that what we perceive as negative about reality is not reality itself but the stories we tell ourselves about reality; and that art, if we invest sufficient effort in it, allows us to transcend these negative interpretations and to see reality for what it is. He wrote, The great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.

Although it may seem that Nietzsche and Camus contradict each other, in fact, their differences are only in their premises, and not in their conclusion that art has the power to elevate life. In my opinion, Camus is correct in implying that reality is neither innately good nor innately bad—it is indifferent, and as such we are free to interpret and perceive reality as we choose. Among the great tragedies of humanity, I believe, is that most people are not aware that they have such a choice. We accept as inevitable what others declare to be good or bad, and sometimes we don’t even realize the power we have to elevate our lives by resisting, or at least balancing, such imposed values. For example, in accepting such things as busy careers, material wealth, and prevailing in competitions against others as good, we may fail to see the greater good (at least in proportion) of leisure, of avoiding the complexities that come from superfluous possessions and obligations, of not measuring ourselves against others (especially when such measuring ultimately amounts to another person’s subjective opinion), and of pursuing rewarding experiences (such as artistic expression) for their own sake, and not for any material outcome.

For about half of my photographic career I failed to realize what Camus meant by the ordeal that art demands. The ordeals in my life generally came from mundane obligations, stressful employment, or complicated relationships. These things had little to do with art or photography. In fact, in those times when I was free to photograph, I found photography to be exactly the opposite of an ordeal: it was a way to set aside for a while the trials of life. Photography did not seem to me to be demanding, as Camus described, but easy and enjoyable. Alas, the same was true of my photographs from that time: they were easy and enjoyable, but not more than that, and at the time I didn’t feel they needed to be. More accurately, I didn’t know how much more rewarding they could be. Despite being beautiful, most of these photographs were quite ordinary, uncreative, and easily forgettable. However, every so often I did experience times of profound inspiration and creative energy. The photographs arising from these uncommon states were of a different nature: they were not only unique and original, but also more challenging to make, requiring greater investment of thought, time, and labor than just aiming the camera at something beautiful and pushing some buttons. More important, these photographs felt much more profound, meaningful, and memorable than those that were easy to make; and they gave me a sense of pride beyond just taking joy in good fortune or in witnessing a beautiful scene.

For a while I believed that creative epiphanies were lucky coincidences—statistical anomalies that happened every now and then in the course of ordinary work, for no real reason and requiring no conscious action or attitude. This changed for me as I became more versed in art, in cognitive sciences, and in philosophy. Specifically, I began to identify bits of wisdom in the writings of scientists, artists, authors, and other thinkers relating, in one choice of words or another, to the inner rewards of the psychological state of flow. Flow—referred to by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as optimal experience—is a deeply enjoyable state, which may lead to the intuitive but incorrect assumption that flow ensues from ease and relaxation. Csikszentmihalyi suggests that, in fact, the opposite is true, writing, "The best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times [. . .] The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." [Emphasis added.]

I decided to try it—to invest as much energy, creative thinking, and emotional engagement as I could in making my photographs. After some early attempts, I realized two things: first, that accomplishing such intensity of engagement was difficult, as my mind kept wandering; and second, that when I was successful, I not only made better (i.e., more satisfying) photographs, but also my emotional experiences became richer and more intense.

After more practice, I experienced yet another revelation: because making such photographs demanded a high degree of attention and cognitive effort, I was not aware I was experiencing flow until after I was done, when I suddenly felt like I had woken up from a lucid dream. I felt an emotional version of the sweet, endorphin-induced physical exhaustion that often follows a long and difficult workout. I also felt a sense of accomplishment and pride, and felt justified in allowing myself a well-earned break. I just wanted to sit for a while to savor the feeling and the memory of the experience.

In time, these feelings became so consequential to my satisfaction with my work that I decided to pursue all photography in this manner—to stop chasing after fortuitous circumstances and benign aesthetics, and instead invest whatever time and effort I could muster to become so emotionally and creatively engaged in my experiences, both in the field and in the studio, that nothing else occupied my mind. This required training my mind to let go of distractions, to focus entirely on conjuring concepts I previously would not have thought to consider (or perhaps even considered impossible), and to work on them incessantly—to think of possibilities and to experiment constantly, to strive to visualize as effectively as I could how I may be able to use certain visuals and/or to express certain feelings—even if ultimately unsuccessful. Ironically, I realized I had become like those characters I always felt sorry for in television shows—those whose entire lives revolved around their professions and workplaces. Except that I didn’t have to confine myself to a hospital or a police station or an office. I could wander in solitude in sublime places, and process my work in the comfort of my quiet office with jazz music playing, and I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

The adjustment to this mode of work was difficult, even unpleasant at times, but after a while it became intuitive and habitual, and I realized that making photographs in any other mode seemed boring and unsatisfying in comparison. It might seem like an unproductive way to approach photography, especially for a professional, but productivity is not much of a concern to me. I live a simple life by design, and I need only to make so many photographs in a given period to be able to sustain the income I need.

While most photographers, especially nature and landscape photographers, find ways to fit photography and outdoor experiences into their otherwise busy lives, I chose instead to simplify my life and to design it such that pursuing my idea of rewarding experiences is now my primary occupation. I am not beholden to any routine. On most days I can wake up in the morning and decide what I want to do, where I want to go, and how long I want to be there. Almost every day I have time to read, to study, to listen to music, to experiment with my work without concern for any outcome. The more I learn and experience, the more I want to learn and experience. The more I discover, the more I want to discover. The more expressive I become, the more expressive I want to become. The more seriously I take my work, the more seriously I want to take it.

There are many ways and many reasons to make art—many missions that art may serve. Art, photographic or other, can be a source of great beauty and interest to those who view it, but there is another realm in art that is available only to artists, only to those who take their work seriously. By becoming serious to the point of obsession about photography, I didn’t ruin a good hobby; I discovered a better life. I discovered, in the words of Bill Evans, the real mission of art.

2My Audience

Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves. Whistle and dance the shimmy, and you’ve got an audience.

—Diogenes Laërtius

A marketing maven (which I am not) suggested to me that I give some thought to who my audience is, and to target my writing and images to that audience. Despite such advice, I continue to favor the notion that it is more honest and more rewarding to write and photograph what I believe to be important and useful, which also has the added advantage of defining my audience as the people who also find my work important or useful. However, I am not one to dismiss good advice, by which I am referring not to the advice to target my work to a predetermined audience, but to the advice to think about who my audience is.

I believe that a useful way for artists to approach an understanding of their audience is not by deciding arbitrarily what their audiences should be and then bridling their work, but rather through a process of elimination. By explicitly acknowledging those who may not necessarily appreciate my work, I am also able to unburden my work of certain undesirable constraints and compromises. Like it or not, you cannot please everyone, and as an artist you should not try to.

Business goals generally favor appealing to the largest possible audience, but such an approach is inevitably biased toward some low common denominator, misrepresentation, obfuscation of negative aspects (which, alas, are a part of any life and any endeavor), and avoiding heady or contentious topics. Regrettably, such considerations are in contrast to my above-stated goal of making my work about things I consider to be important and useful. And so, rather than compromise my work, I prefer to restate my business goal in a manner that might make marketing professionals cringe. My primary business goal—my mission statement, if you will—is simply to sustain the life I already have. I am not interested in growth but in stability, and in maintaining my freedom to pursue meaningful and rewarding experiences, which, among other things, are meaningful and rewarding because they are decidedly disconnected from considerations of business, profit, growth, and marketing.

In an interview for the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life, Deborah Brandt, author of the book The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy, made the provocative suggestion that most writers today do not write for readers, but rather as a means of interacting with fellow writers. I believe that the same is also true for photographers. It likely will not be difficult to make the case that most of us photograph (and/or write about photography) in order to interact with other photographers. In thinking about it further, I realized that in my case this is only part of the story. Photography to me is a vehicle, and recognizing that my photographs and writings may primarily draw other photographers, I still consider them more as delivery systems, rather than as goals—as means, rather than ends.

My work is also not specifically aimed at publishers, galleries, or collectors. Although such interests are welcome, to specifically create for institutionalized buyers always comes at the cost of creative compromises and the requirement to play by some arbitrary rules of these markets that do not appeal to me (e.g., limiting editions, keeping up with trends, or the bewildering pseudo-language some refer to as artspeak). Such buyers are also often interested in artists as brands—eccentric, gifted, or even mythical figures, rather than as fallible human beings navigating the stream of life with the same joys and fears, convictions and doubts, gifts and flaws, as anyone else (brands often founded in a degree of aggrandizement that I am admittedly not comfortable with). It would be hypocritical of me to misrepresent myself as a great artist or as a great writer or as a great anything. Bach and Picasso and Strand were great artists; Faulkner and Tolstoy and Hesse were great writers; Einstein and Nietzsche and Russell were great thinkers. I am not in that league. To the extent that people wish to purchase my work, I hope they do so because they appreciate it for what it is and for what inspiration they find in it, and not as a financial investment or as a conversation piece.

Although I revel in beauty, I do not create solely for aesthetic reasons. Artists ultimately trade in two things: decoration and inspiration. In my work I choose to emphasize the latter because I consider it more important. I do so with the knowledge that it is both harder to accomplish and generally less profitable as a business model.

A piece of advice often given to budding artists is this: create primarily for yourself, and not for others. Perhaps an antithesis to the calculated approach of marketers, it is sound advice for those who wish to reap the greatest personal benefit from the making of art. There is, however, a more nuanced version that is more relevant to those who wish to create professionally, which is this: create for those with whom you have things in common. What I mean by this is that you can create for yourself and still make work that is useful to others who may share some ideas, feelings, or sensibilities with you.

Even though we are each unique—each a product of certain circumstances, experiences, sensibilities, and interests—there will always be others who share at least some of the things that inspire you, some of your interests, some of your sensibilities, or some of your philosophy. I believe that the best of all options for artists who wish to pursue their work professionally while maintaining artistic independence and integrity is to create