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The One Skill That Actually Makes Photography Beautiful (It's Not Composition) - Moments of Mood, 3.6 · The MOOD Podcast

• 0:00
  Matt Jacob: If you want to make photographs that actually mean something, work that feels unmistakably yours, you've probably asked yourself the same question I have before.
• 0:11
  Matt Jacob: How do my pictures of beautiful things still feel empty while someone else can photograph a cardboard box in plain sunlight and it stops me cold?
• 0:22
  Matt Jacob: I want to show you what beauty in photography actually is, why it was never about what is in front of your lens, and the one skill to double down on now your attention so that your work starts carrying your voice instead of just your subjects.
• 0:38
  Matt Jacob: A few weeks ago, I sat down with Tim Carpenter on the podcast, and somewhere around the hour mark, I asked him what beauty in a photograph actually means to him.
• 0:57
  Tim: So the one I will go back to, and you know, it's in the it's in the first book, but it's gonna be in the second one too.
• 1:02
  Tim: I agree with Robert Adams said that you know, he pretty much equated beauty with form.
• 1:07
  Tim: Uh with what a lot of people call significant form.
• 1:10
  Tim: And I what I think is that, and this is gonna be all in the second book.
• 1:16
  Tim: I've been talking about you know, us creatures and what the what a phenomenologist would say, both the philosophers and the neuroscientists, by the way, would say that this this creature is in an almost constant state of imbalance, and it's always looking to make it to balance it to get a better grip on its inputs.
• 1:37
  Tim: You know, um we're we're we're in a constant state of frustration.
• 1:41
  Tim: And when when our disequilibrium becomes a little bit of equilibrium, the body relaxes for a moment.
• 1:49
  Tim: That's fleeting and it's furtive, but the body says, I gotta control on this, I got a hand on this, you know.
• 1:54
  Tim: Like also, this is why we like being in our homes and stuff, is because uh, you know, all of those uh inputs are calmed, you know, and that's why we can feel calm and that we can't out in the world because of all you know the the diversity and the the the speed of all the inputs.
• 2:11
  Tim: But but okay, so what I'm going towards is that like this creature needs form.
• 2:17
  Tim: It needs for for some things occasionally to make some sense and say, all right, I got a grip on this, things are good for the for my survival.
• 2:27
  Tim: What I really want to work on in this in this next book, and um I'll give it away now, uh, is that I think that form in any artwork is a model for that form that brings us a bit of equilibrium.
• 2:43
  Tim: And that's why I think we have a bodily response and a non-linguistic response to form.
• 2:48
  Tim: All right.
• 2:49
  Tim: That's that's how this all kind of comes back around together.
• 2:53
  Tim: Um you know, like we it uh uh when we see equilibrium in a in a picture, in a poem, in a painting.
• 3:00
  Tim: All right, I understand in that made thing what I'm always trying to do.
• 3:06
  Tim: And we would never articulate this, you know, like and here's the twister is that the photograph is the thing that's most attached, most tethered to the actual world.
• 3:16
  Tim: So it's I for me, I think it's the most it's it just does does that job the best because those are actual things, you know.
• 3:24
  Tim: Like uh even though we you know we can love a painting or love a poem, but we know that we're living in an imaginary world.
• 3:30
  Tim: And it with the photograph, it's different.
• 3:33
  Tim: You know, like it's it's we know we're we're familiar with we we live in that same world, and and somehow this person, she found a purchase on the world for a moment that makes sense to me.
• 3:46
  Tim: Um so that's where I really, you know, like I think that I think the form is and that's why it's be we call it beauty, because you know, like uh a beauty is a relief.
• 3:57
  Tim: Um, you know, it it's a wholeness, it's a completeness.
• 4:02
  Matt Jacob: His answer has been with me since, and I've been thinking about it because he didn't talk about light or subjects or style.
• 4:08
  Matt Jacob: He talked about chaos and about fear, about why a creature like us needs form the way it needs shelter.
• 4:15
  Matt Jacob: I have one of my own pictures with me here on the screen.
• 4:19
  Matt Jacob: Nobody would call this subject beautiful.
• 4:21
  Matt Jacob: No one would probably travel for it.
• 4:23
  Matt Jacob: And by the end of this episode, I want you to see why it might be the most honest kind of photograph I make, and why the beauty you have been going out to find has been weighty in how you look, not in what you actually look at.
• 4:39
  Matt Jacob: This is the Moo Podcast.
• 4:41
  Matt Jacob: I'm Matt Jacob, and this is the show that helps emerging photographers find their voice so that you can build a cohesive body of work, articulate what that work is about, and get it in front of the right people.
• 4:54
  Matt Jacob: It's the only photography podcast that is itself a practice because every week I sit down with a guest or break down a single idea in a commentary like this one called Moments of Mood.
• 5:06
  Matt Jacob: Either way, we slow down and turn one idea over in the hand until it shows us something about how we see and who we are becoming as artists.
• 5:17
  Matt Jacob: Now, two questions sit underneath everything today.
• 5:20
  Matt Jacob: The first, is beauty a property of things, something out there to be found, or is it something made by the quality of attention that you bring?
• 5:29
  Matt Jacob: And the second question, and the one that touches your voice directly, if beauty is made and not found, then what does your eye keep making without you necessarily asking it to?
• 5:40
  Matt Jacob: And what would happen if you started paying attention more to that?
• 5:45
  Matt Jacob: Before we go on, though, sit with me for half a minute.
• 5:48
  Matt Jacob: Lift your eyes from this screen and find the most ordinary thing near you right now.
• 5:53
  Matt Jacob: It could be a carp or a doorframe or the fold of a curtain.
• 5:57
  Matt Jacob: Now look at it the way you would look at something that actually mattered.
• 6:01
  Matt Jacob: Focus and give it the attention you would give a face that you love.
• 6:04
  Matt Jacob: And notice what happens.
• 6:06
  Matt Jacob: The thing hasn't changed, but something has started to gather around it.
• 6:10
  Matt Jacob: The kind of weight, kind of order and the details.
• 6:13
  Matt Jacob: And hold on to your attention right there because that small act is the entire subject of today, and we're going to come back to it.
• 6:22
  Matt Jacob: So let me take you back into that conversation I had with Tim, because as I said, I asked him what beauty means to him in a photograph.
• 6:31
  Matt Jacob: And when answering, uh, he referenced Robert Adams as expected, and his book, Beauty in Photography.
• 6:37
  Matt Jacob: His words on the show were that he agrees with Adams, who, as Tim put it, pretty much equated beauty with form, and that's pretty much what that book is about.
• 6:45
  Matt Jacob: What a lot of people call significant form, that is.
• 6:48
  Matt Jacob: Not beauty as prettiness, not beauty as subject matter, beauty as structure, as the way a picture holds together with all of its elements.
• 6:57
  Matt Jacob: And then he explained why that actually matters.
• 7:00
  Matt Jacob: He said that we're creatures in an almost constant state of imbalance, always trying to get a better grip on the flood of the world coming at us now more than ever.
• 7:11
  Matt Jacob: We live, in his words, in a constant state of frustration.
• 7:15
  Matt Jacob: And when, for a moment, that disequilibrium becomes a little bit of equilibrium, the body relaxes and the body says, I have a hold on this.
• 7:26
  Matt Jacob: And then he said that beauty is a relief, it is a wholeness, a completeness.
• 7:31
  Matt Jacob: And he quoted the poet Wallace Stevens, who called it a sudden rightness.
• 7:36
  Matt Jacob: But I don't know, that phrase only means something once you know what form actually is, right?
• 7:58
  Matt Jacob: And it is not what most people think, I don't think.
• 8:01
  Matt Jacob: When most photographers hear this word form, they might just think of composition rules or shapes or some art school abstraction or theory.
• 8:12
  Matt Jacob: Tim means something a little bit more radical, I think, and he was precise about this on the episode.
• 8:18
  Matt Jacob: Form, he said, is the structure of the picture.
• 8:22
  Matt Jacob: That form is how one places one body in relation to the world and the subject matter, of course.
• 8:29
  Matt Jacob: Are you getting in really tight?
• 8:31
  Matt Jacob: Or are you maintaining a distance?
• 8:33
  Matt Jacob: Are you leaving dead space in foregrounds like Tim said he used to do?
• 8:38
  Matt Jacob: It is the edges of the picture, the footing, where you have a purchase on the world.
• 8:43
  Matt Jacob: It is the aperture you chose, the focal length, the speed, the tones of the print, so much.
• 8:50
  Matt Jacob: And he calls these machine things, formal choices.
• 8:54
  Matt Jacob: Every one of them is part of form.
• 8:56
  Matt Jacob: Put it as plainly as I can: form is everything in the photograph except the subject, the position you stood in, or the angle you chose, or the distance you kept, the moment that you pressed, why that moment?
• 9:12
  Matt Jacob: All these decisions you made, and the decisions you did not know where they were coming from or why you were making them.
• 9:19
  Matt Jacob: Form is the photographer pressed invisibly into the frame.
• 9:23
  Matt Jacob: Now, Tim gave an example as well that I think kind of nails it.
• 9:27
  Matt Jacob: Photograph a national flag or a Christian cross or a handgun, even, and everything you would say about those pictures, the politics, the meanings, the associations, all of it lives in your mind, not in the picture.
• 9:41
  Matt Jacob: Concepts only live in brains, but the form, the distance, the light, the structure, the held order of the thing, that is absolutely in the picture as well.
• 9:51
  Matt Jacob: And then he explained why form is what actually moves us as human beings.
• 9:57
  Matt Jacob: For anything to really hit, he said, the form has to hit first.
• 10:01
  Matt Jacob: The beauty of the picture has to come to you first.
• 10:05
  Matt Jacob: And then only then can the message land.
• 10:08
  Matt Jacob: Going back to my ordinary picture that I have on the screen, with that definition in your ear now, the subject is nothing, but everything else in it, the distance, the weight, the way the frame holds, that's all me.
• 10:23
  Matt Jacob: That is the part that cannot at all be removed from the picture, because it is the picture.
• 10:30
  Matt Jacob: Now hold that against the way almost all of us were taught to think about beauty.
• 10:36
  Matt Jacob: Because the general consensus runs the other way entirely.
• 10:40
  Matt Jacob: Beauty, we are told and shown, is subject matter.
• 10:44
  Matt Jacob: It is the beautiful golden hour and the dramatic coastline.
• 10:47
  Matt Jacob: It is the photogenic face, the exotic location, the striking thing.
• 10:54
  Matt Jacob: The entire visual economy we scroll through every day is built on this.
• 10:59
  Matt Jacob: Find a more beautiful subject, and you will have a more beautiful photograph.
• 11:05
  Matt Jacob: So we save for the trip, we chase the light, we envy the photographers who live somewhere better.
• 11:13
  Matt Jacob: And our own street, our own minds, our own rooms, our own ordinary lives start to feel like a disqualification.
• 11:22
  Matt Jacob: Now, Tim made the same mistake as I have, as all of us have, and he admitted it on the show with a confession I loved him for.
• 11:30
  Matt Jacob: Early on, deep in his road trip period, he would come back from a shoot with hundred roles of film and find himself thinking, I hope that old motel sign worked out.
• 11:42
  Matt Jacob: I hope that interesting looking guy turned out as I pictured it.
• 11:47
  Matt Jacob: In his own words, I was so subject matter driven because I was thinking about those photographers that I loved in the wrong way.
• 11:56
  Matt Jacob: I was just looking at what they had photographed and not how they were structuring that whole thing.
• 12:02
  Matt Jacob: It took a project along a vanished rail line near his hometown in central Illinois, a place with nothing to find, no signs, no characters, just trees and water and roads to force him to stop hunting subjects and start making structure.
• 12:19
  Matt Jacob: The place gave him not that much, so everything in the pictures had to come from him.
• 12:24
  Matt Jacob: That is the turn.
• 12:26
  Matt Jacob: And most photographers never make it because the consensus keeps whispering.
• 12:31
  Matt Jacob: It keeps whispering that the problem is their subjects, when the invitation the whole time was just their attention.
• 12:40
  Matt Jacob: On the episode with Tim, I did read a few passages out loud from his book To Photograph is to learn how to die, where he quotes Robert Adams, asking the question directly: why is form beautiful?
• 12:51
  Matt Jacob: And Adams answers, because I think it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.
• 13:04
  Matt Jacob: Sit with how serious and deep that is.
• 13:07
  Matt Jacob: Adams is saying that when you stand in front of the mess of the world and find the one position from which it coheres, you are not decorating anything, right?
• 13:18
  Matt Jacob: You are answering in the only language the body fully trusts, the oldest fear we have, the fear that none of it hangs together.
• 13:28
  Matt Jacob: A beautiful photograph is just a small standing proof that the world can cohere.
• 13:34
  Matt Jacob: That for one moment from one position, held by one person paying attention, it did.
• 13:41
  Matt Jacob: Now, Adams went further, of course, and you can read his book, but he said that form in a picture is justified by experience of wholeness, coherence in life.
• 13:51
  Matt Jacob: And if art is to convincingly remind us of that experience, the shape in art has to be believably tentative, as fragile as meaning seems to be in life.
• 14:04
  Matt Jacob: Which is why the most moving photographs, I think, are never the airtight, over-perfected ones.
• 14:10
  Matt Jacob: They hold, but barely, like meaning does.
• 14:14
  Matt Jacob: One thing here in the middle of my rant, and then I will get it out of the way, but attention is a practice, and practices deepen fastest in company.
• 14:24
  Matt Jacob: I've built that company in the mood insiders.
• 14:27
  Matt Jacob: It's a room where the scoreboard is off, where nobody asks how a picture performed, and where in our critiques and our book club sessions, we look at work exactly the way Tim looks at it or Robert Adams looks at it, going into the edges, the depths, the form, the way a body met the world long before anyone reaches for what it is actually about.
• 14:50
  Matt Jacob: So if you want to train your attention among people doing the same slow introspective work, that room is there.
• 14:58
  Matt Jacob: Now, back to the conversation, because there is one more thing that Tim said that completes the definition of form and is the idea the whole episode was named for.
• 15:10
  Matt Jacob: He said that if he were six inches taller or six inches shorter, every single one of his pictures would be different.
• 15:18
  Matt Jacob: The camera is attached to our body, right?
• 15:21
  Matt Jacob: And the body cannot lie.
• 15:23
  Matt Jacob: If you're happy, your shoulders open.
• 15:26
  Matt Jacob: If things are not so great, you close in a little bit and you move differently.
• 15:30
  Matt Jacob: And the machine is responsive to every bit of that.
• 15:34
  Matt Jacob: You cannot fool yourself out of it, he said.
• 15:36
  Matt Jacob: So you cannot fool a dumb machine out of it either.
• 15:40
  Matt Jacob: Which means form is not only a set of choices you make.
• 15:46
  Matt Jacob: It's more a record of how you specifically meet the world, including the parts you have never consciously chosen.
• 15:55
  Matt Jacob: So when I look at this picture now, I can read myself in it, the distance I kept, where I placed my feet, my hands, what I could not help including.
• 16:06
  Matt Jacob: Tim said that when someone sits in front of him with 50 pictures, such as in a review, he's watching how another human being moves his or her body against the world, and that every person is, in his words, a fresh miracle.
• 16:20
  Matt Jacob: How lovely.
• 16:21
  Matt Jacob: And your contact sheet is that, your Lightroom catalogue is that.
• 16:25
  Matt Jacob: Not an attempt at beauty, but a record of a particular creature finding a particular order.
• 16:31
  Matt Jacob: But here's the catch.
• 16:33
  Matt Jacob: And it's the reason I keep returning to attention and mindfulness.
• 16:37
  Matt Jacob: The body writes your form, whether you are thinking or watching it or not.
• 16:42
  Matt Jacob: The question is whether you can read what it wrote for you.
• 16:46
  Matt Jacob: And that's a skill and a trainable one.
• 16:48
  Matt Jacob: And its name is awareness or mindfulness.
• 16:51
  Matt Jacob: Now, remember what happened in the still point at the start of this conversation.
• 16:57
  Matt Jacob: You gave an ordinary object the attention you would give a face that you love, and something gathered around it.
• 17:06
  Matt Jacob: Nothing in the object changed, of course.
• 17:08
  Matt Jacob: Your attention changed, and order started to begin.
• 17:12
  Matt Jacob: And that is the practice in miniature form.
• 17:15
  Matt Jacob: Mindfulness is not incense and silence, not for us.
• 17:19
  Matt Jacob: For a photographer, it is the capacity to notice, to notice what you are drawn to before you can justify it, to notice the distance your body wants to keep today and to wonder why, to investigate that, to be curious, to notice in Tim's phrasing what you have been making, because he says exactly this to his students that at some point you have to yank yourself out of the flow, put the screws to it, and ask, what have I been making here and why?
• 17:50
  Matt Jacob: And he told a story during our conversation about doing it to himself, editing his first book.
• 17:58
  Matt Jacob: He noticed an unusual amount of dead foreground space in his images, a gap between himself and everything else.
• 18:07
  Matt Jacob: And his next thought was what is that saying about me?
• 18:11
  Matt Jacob: Am I a distant person right now?
• 18:13
  Matt Jacob: And he said that actually that was the case.
• 18:16
  Matt Jacob: His form knew his inner life before he did.
• 18:19
  Matt Jacob: That is what awareness buys you.
• 18:22
  Matt Jacob: The body decides the photograph before you do.
• 18:26
  Matt Jacob: But attention is how you finally get to read the decision.
• 18:30
  Matt Jacob: And reading it is how a scattered set of pictures becomes a cohesive one and a voice that you can name.
• 18:37
  Matt Jacob: This is why I sit every morning before I touch a camera or a screen or do anything, not to necessarily relax, but to sharpen the one instrument every photograph I make is made with my mind and my attention.
• 18:51
  Matt Jacob: Okay, so let's bring all of this together and let's land it.
• 18:55
  Matt Jacob: Because the genuinely consoling part is if beauty is form and form is made by attention, then nothing in your life is beneath the camera.
• 19:04
  Matt Jacob: You do not need that trip you can't afford, or the location, or the spectacular face.
• 19:10
  Matt Jacob: Take Robert Adams, who made his life's work from suburbs and tracked houses that his contemporaries thought was beneath photographing.
• 19:20
  Matt Jacob: Now, Tim makes his from trees and roads in central Illinois.
• 19:25
  Matt Jacob: The whole argument of their work is that coherence can be made anywhere by anyone willing to attend.
• 19:33
  Matt Jacob: And every time you make it, you are doing the old serious human thing.
• 19:37
  Matt Jacob: You are answering chaos with a small held order.
• 19:42
  Matt Jacob: You are reminding yourself and anyone who later stands in front of the picture that the world can still come right suddenly, just for a moment, from where you stood.
• 19:54
  Matt Jacob: That is what beauty is for.
• 19:56
  Matt Jacob: That's what it is, and it always was.
• 19:59
  Matt Jacob: So let me gather this into a few things that you can carry out starting today.
• 20:04
  Matt Jacob: The first thing is to understand beauty is not found, it is made.
• 20:08
  Matt Jacob: It is form the held order of the picture, and the instrument that makes it is your attention.
• 20:14
  Matt Jacob: So start paying attention, be mindful, and most importantly, practice it.
• 20:19
  Matt Jacob: Number two, form answers fear.
• 20:22
  Matt Jacob: Every coherent frame is a small proof against the suspicion that life is chaos, and it moves us most when it is tentative, as fragile as meaning is in life.
• 20:34
  Matt Jacob: Number three, your form is your voice, often without you even knowing it.
• 20:40
  Matt Jacob: The mind, and by extension, your body, decides the photograph before you do, and the order your eye keeps making without being asked is the most honest signature you have.
• 20:52
  Matt Jacob: So stop trying to find it elsewhere and start noticing what it already does.
• 20:59
  Matt Jacob: So take your camera to the most ordinary place in your life, maybe.
• 21:04
  Matt Jacob: The street you no longer see, the room you stopped looking at years ago, the town you're too familiar with, and make one photograph in which the form holds, not a beautiful subject, a held frame.
• 21:15
  Matt Jacob: Then look at it and just ask one question.
• 21:18
  Matt Jacob: What kind of order did I just make?
• 21:21
  Matt Jacob: And what does it say about how I meet the world?
• 21:24
  Matt Jacob: I get that's two questions really.
• 21:26
  Matt Jacob: But do that honestly, even once, and you will have done two things at the same time.
• 21:31
  Matt Jacob: You would have made something beautiful out of nothing anyone else would have maybe overlooked, and you will have heard quietly, in the structure of your own picture, the sound of that voice of yours.
• 21:47
  Matt Jacob: So now you can see that maybe beauty was never out there in the subjects, but it was made by your attention.
• 21:54
  Matt Jacob: And your form is your voice just waiting to be read.
• 21:58
  Matt Jacob: But how do you actually develop that awareness, that self-knowledge that lets you read your voice and see your own patterns before they pass?
• 22:09
  Matt Jacob: Well, check out this next video where we dive into the hidden psychology behind your photography and talk about the benefits of mindfulness when it comes to practicing the craft of photography itself.
• 22:22
  Matt Jacob: I'll see you there.
• 22:23
  Matt Jacob: Happy shooting.