Photographer Magazine (2001)
Throughout the years I have been teaching photography, I have observed the development of my students from their novice steps to conscious creation, and I have identified the formation of a gradual pattern that repeats almost identically with minimal deviations. This path may simply extend from ignorance to knowledge, but it may also continue or be accompanied by the corresponding journey from presumed artistry to real creation. It refers to those who started photography out of joy and love and therefore decided to seriously incorporate it into their lives.
The first period is characterized by absolute darkness, when the certainties of the past are overturned, without the fertile doubts of the present having yet taken their place. That is when one stops believing that they know what good photography is (as they had firmly believed until that moment) and cannot yet recognize the quality of what is presented to them as good. In this first period, photographic production is very difficult and nearly impossible to critically assess properly, since the criteria have not yet been established.
The second period coincides with the first charming opening of the curtain. Good photographs by others begin to stand out, though not yet in their full range. Photographic production experiences a second start within a more disciplined framework. Criteria are formed one after another. The result, however, ranges from artistically non-existent to photographically insignificant. The photographer fails to touch the quality he has begun to admire with his own photographs. And this is something he can now ascertain for himself.
The third period is perhaps the happiest. That is when the photographer not only enjoys the photography of others (and usually enjoys it more and more deeply), but can also create his own photographs, which now begin to satisfy him. This turnaround usually happens suddenly. Like an 'unblocking' of the mind. After this turn, nothing will be as (photographically) trivial as before. The traps and dangers may be greater, but they will move on a different level of photographic knowledge and awareness. The photographs may be mediocre, but they will not be artistically non-existent.
The fourth period, which also marks the beginning of weaning from the influence and the consequent security provided by the cover of the teacher, is the longest, characterized by the most intense anxiety, but fortunately also by the greatest joys. It is the endless period of artistic creation with its exacerbations and recessions, its enthusiasms and disappointments. The photographer now produces photographs that provide the assurance of a well-crafted image and the seed of a not so improbable high quality. Quality that, when it appears, fills him with joy, but also burdens him with anxiety, since he knows that it can neither be certain nor frequent.
The evolution from this point onwards is distinguished into two general, though necessarily schematic, categories. Belonging to one of these categories relates more to the character, the broader education, and the ethical positioning of the photographer, rather than to his intelligence and talent, which we assume he has (in whichever category we place him) and that in any case his insecurity about whether he possesses them to a high degree is related to the above parameters.
Those who belong to the first category continue, albeit self-flagellating and grumbling, to photograph and produce work that progresses at slow but steady rhythms either qualitatively straight or qualitatively ascending. Their characteristics are that they keep their ego in a controlled state, that despite the significant place that photography has in their lives it has not eliminated other values and various interests, but mainly that despite the creative anxieties and impasses they continue to enjoy photography. Those in the second category have let their ego run wild, have made not photography but photographic success the center of their lives, and most importantly have lost the joy of photography, the joy with which they started the whole story.
The study of the work of many well-known (Greek and foreign) photographers, whom I believe belong to the second category, convinces me that the pattern I have observed within the small circle of my students applies to a much broader space, where the tree of success and exposure hides the forest of creation. I am repeatedly surprised at the quality of the youthful work of a photographer, whose current production is characterized by impressive shallowness and simplicity. Characteristics that cannot be offset by the usually excessive presentation, but which are capable of promising easier access to publicity.
The only advice I could give to photographers of the first category, which it is clear that I prefer and appreciate, is to make sure to cultivate their creative (and certainly not their social) ego, as this will make it easier for them to remain in the orbit of creative production and development, and to those of the second category, on the one hand to seek the reasons for the loss of creative joy and on the other to imagine how their work is seen and judged by the few, usually very few, whose opinion really should matter to them. That is, the great teachers of the past and the circle of their acquaintances of the present.
Plato Rivellis