ROUGH SURFPhoto by, Damon Higgins, as published in the Palm Beach Daily News 8/29/21

“Beauty is truth – truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” Almost daily, on my morning walks I pass by this (JOHN KEATS) quote, etched into the exterior facade of the Norton Museum of Art. It never ages and has become, for me, a daily affirmation. For, is that not precisely what we do as artists? Show up fully to the scenes and subjects before us? Uncover their truths, embody them somehow, and then go off and express them for the wonder of others?

I'm not someone who tends to equate or define the truth as a mere set of facts. For me, the truth lies well below a surface - simmering as some utterance of a soul. A lifetime of creative practice (and of studying the works of other photographers) has shown me that we rarely arrive at such utterances by calculating and calling all the shots in our picture making. We get there by loosening our grip, by allowing for the limits of our certainties, and by getting out of the picture.

"No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well as the truth," wrote HENRY DAVID THOREAU in the pages of Walden. I could not agree more, and to mine it takes work. When I cue this approach of "stepping out of the picture," I'm not suggesting an absence of effort in our creative expression of the people and the moments we witness. But, what happens when we allow the exertion of the technical orchestration of a capture to subside in order to pour that agency into clearing the mind and heightening the senses so that we hear and see our subjects and convey truths from some higher frequency? It's really that simple of a shift. And, we well know the answer. This is a reminder...




DAMON HIGGINS is an award winning photographer for the Palm Beach Post/Palm Beach Daily News. Throughout his 20 year career with the publication, his images have been widely revered by readers for their powerful ability to stop time. It's September in southern Florida. The shoreline pulses a softer soundtrack. As he can attest, in these 90 degree plus days, the treasure trove of February content is not bubbling over. Yet still, an endless humanity endures. The above (words and image) were originally published in the Sunday, August 29th edition of the Palm Beach Daily News. As evident, the content is about one (and only one) thing. It conveys a quiet utterance of the soul - seizes you up as it does. Is Yakov (the subject) in prayer? His companion testimony further reveals, padding the capture's poetry. The moment and the composition are extraordinary precisely because the photographer did NOT plot and intrude in its unfolding. He simply noticed what he noticed, listened in fully, followed some inner stirring, and caught it. There's a collective win in his doing so.


"When I arrived at The Post, the paper was booming. There was this HUGE budget and every photographer had their own assignments, as directed by our editors. Now, that's not the case. Because of our drastically reduced staffing, the photographers have to go out each day and find their own assignments. We have to force ourselves to go out and look for creative stuff. So, you train yourself - train yourself to see what's different each day. You look for the light, and what's happening in it."

"I drive slowly by this stretch of beach multiple times each day, just quietly observing the nature of things to see what shows up. Last week, I saw Yakov standing in the water just staring out to the sky. I watched him for like 20 minutes, his back to the sand. He just looked to me like he was doing something. What it was I didn't know. After asking his permission, I took some shots. While making my pictures, I actually asked him to please not turn towards my lens. I didn't want him to be aware of me. When I got the shot, I knew it was special. Then, Yakov shared his story - why he was there. He wanted everyone to know what the surf does for his knees."

"What have I learned through the thousands of pictures I've captured in my work? In the end... it's not about the photo. It's about the people in them - who they are, their story. For me, just meeting people is the beautiful part."



“Beauty is truth – truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”

The motivations for the endless hours we spend behind these lenses are unique for each of us. The common thread? To tell one story, or another. The evidence shows that we BEST honor the histories we document when we remember to lower our own volumes and simply step ourselves OUT of the picture. Truth is beauty? Often, that is all we need to know.




Above image by Damon Higgins, as published in the August 29, 2021 edition of the Palm Beach Daily News. 

Damon Higgins joined the photography staff at The Palm Beach Post in 2001 where, in addition to being named Cox Newspapers’ Rookie of the Year, he has also been named Cox Newspapers’ Photographer of the Year.His work has appeared in a wide range of well known and respected publications, including Success Magazine, ESPN the Magazine, and Palm Beach Life Magazine. To learn more about Damon and his work, please visit DAMONHIGGINS.COM.
 

Knowing things for certain has a way of hijacking the imagination we were each born to follow. Yet through our moments, hours, and days... on we forage, striving for certainty. Exhausting and depleting is how I find today's results' oriented existence. And so I turn to my artwork - often using my creative process as a practice field for disabling the task-oriented mind. In that space of free expression, I'm released. For some moments, there is nothing to solve.

I continue to be struck by the places we can go when the calculating and the plotting ceases. As of late, spirals and circles have been corralling my attention. Channeling my childhood perhaps? Summertime has me drifting back to long lasting lollipops and Spirograph sessions, looping wheels and rings over and over just to see where it all led. In those moments there was little demand to produce. It was okay to not have all of the answers. As in those free form hours of my youth, I've found a soothe in just following the lead of my current spherical callings. And surprise, surprise... in the ease, SPIN, a new collection of work, came to meet me. 

"YOU MUST LOOK WITHOUT LOOKING TO MAKE THE PERFECT CIRCLE..."

SPIN is an overture to wander in... a fine art series of visual prompts which invite the viewer to still the moment, step away from today's swirling existence, and connect back to a single point of focus. Simply designed, the collection welcomes back wonder and a slow reveal. Available as perfect square metallic prints, and as (extraordinary) one inch thick acrylic photo blocks, SPIN twists the vibrant colorscape here in southern Florida, as originally captured through photographic images. The works' purpose? To offer a polychromatic anchor in which to breathe, reconnect with stillness and disable the incline to unriddle.

Tell me ONE thing you do not know?

  

above quote excerpted from "how to draw a perfect circle", by terrance hayes

The best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell thinks people should be more disagreeable. “A disagreeable person (as defined by psychologists) is someone who does not require the approval of others in order to pursue what they intend to pursue.” In a recent podcast conversation, Gladwell shared this particular unpacking of such individuals. In praise of this character attribute, he furthered that perhaps we, as a culture, sell short just how integral this trait is — particularly for people who “endeavor to improve our world or drive innovation.”

“If you are someone who can’t move a muscle unless the world aligns behind you and pats you on the back, there’s a limit to what you can accomplish.”

Offensive, unpleasant, obnoxious, and abominable… all words which could seamlessly be swapped out for “disagreeable" in its familiar interpretation. The term is customarily lodged in such a light, yet as Gladwell posits in the above language, the characteristic is the X factor in terms of breakthrough. Through the ages, nowhere has this trait been more critical than in the creative life where innovation is endlessly driven. We make art to move ourselves and possibly to move others. In staying true to the former, we make the work that at some point may achieve the latter. Losing the “please” factor liberates our practice and our process and opens a truth fluency in our creative pursuits. It is precisely how we get to extraordinary. 

Archie Bunker, Larry David’s character on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Lucy (sister of Linus)… all amply embody the “obnoxious” quotient and could be deemed consummate disagreeables. But, in looking through the trait’s alternate lens, Vincent van Gogh, Zadie Smith, Jackson Pollack, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac, David Lynch and the likes might be as well. Absent any concern for applause, in their creating, grammar is defied, lines are blurred, mediums are mixed and instruments are unconventionally rigged and tuned, all in order to artistically express themselves in the only means the know how.

Singling out the painter Mark Rothko, I devote a chapter (titled, Who Cares) on this truth in my new book SUPERFLOW Light Up the Artist in You (Nine Rivers, 2021). For the first twenty-five years of his career, Rothko made his paintings on nights and weekends — due to his day job as a teacher—selling zero to few works well into the 1950s. During this chapter of his life, he simply had no interest in defending his work to an audience that could not understand him and his bolt from tradition. Rothko refused to let their confusion derail his world of imagination. So, he continued his slow probe of layers and color blocks, insisting on a creative dialogue that included only him and his art.

How is a “disagreeable" nature integral to our art making? As modeled by Rothko, by refusing to let one’s brushstroke be directed by some external source (i.e. praise), songs and poems and plays are incubated and gestated from the interior — that field of pure imagination. Can you imagine the wonders of which the world would have been swiped had Rothko allowed his inner wisdom to be hijacked for the sake of the high fives of another?



We can practice being disagreeable through the ongoing checking of our personal motives. It’s a powerful probe to pause in whatever creative thread you are following right now and inquire in to weigh the degree to which any external approval might be compromising your true vision. This is not an exercise in which to beat oneself up, but rather just to notice what you notice and in that recognition perhaps dial back that diversion.


“An artist is a person whose hunger refuses yesterday’s bread.”
                                                                                                                       Jane Hirshfield

Today’s group think culture is endlessly pounding home a message of compliance. Of course conformity makes sense in certain of life’s respects, but creative expression is not the place in which to practice passivity — not if you hope to make the rhymes and pictures and paintings that astonish. Creativity extends to each of us a distinct platform for practicing and flexing the disagreeable muscle, to make small protests as we say “so what,” and then go see for ourself. When we do, we unlatch the gate to making work that is limitless and boundless and pure. Stay hungry, practice, study, practice, breathe, practice and be well. And to that mix… allow some space for being disagreeable?