At a recent symposium on Beauty, Creativity and Healing, Dr. Elaine Scarry put forth the notion that the impulse to make art first arises when we see something beautiful and are driven to some kind of activity, drawing or singing or writing it, limning it in some way.

Her statement made perfect sense sitting there in a room of scholars, but it didn’t describe anything like what had happened to me in my beginnings.

Then I came across something that turned that whole idea on it’s head and led me to something much clearer. It’s in a book by Gregory Orr called Poetry as Survival. Orr is the person who wrote a poem that made me want to write the minute I heard it, and that held a key to what he was saying.

He talked about the impulse/inspiration to create in a way I’d never heard before.He said that the thing that makes one want to write a poem about a strong experience is not the emotion itself but the powerful slap that comes from encountering someone else’s poem about the emotion.

This was like a key going into a lock. I remember very clearly that what enthralled me about photography was not the stuff of the world or the my strong response that I wanted to capture for others to see, it was seeing photographs of such things and immediately wanting to make them myself, to capture things wild and complex in photographic images.

Years before starting photography I was quite sure I’d be a writer, what got me to work on that was seeing what actual writers were writing. It made me want to do just that. (it still does.) After college I did a stint in theater, and in that instance what drew me to it me was the thought that I could take emotions and situations and actually encompass them, as I was seeing others do on stage.

Orr’s idea turns a lot of conventional thinking upside down, but it sounds just right to me, just like my own experience. It wasn’t the sight of the world that changed me, it was the sense of power that came from getting it to a size and scope that I could capture and convey.

Hence, for me, from then on, photography.

There’s a larger thought this leads to, but I haven’t gotten it thought through yet. Soon.