Inner Expression

How can you expect a beholder to experience my picture as I experienced it? A picture comes to me a long time beforehand; who knows how long a time beforehand, I sensed, saw, and painted it and yet the next day even I do not understand what I have done. How can anyone penetrate my dreams, my instincts, my desires, my thought, which have taken a long time to fashion themselves and come to the surface, above all to grasp what I put there, perhaps involuntary.

—Pablo Picasso

Alfred Stieglitz promoted the idea of equivalence in photography, requiring that a photographer aim “to record something so completely that those who see it will relive an experience of what had been expressed.” The idea of equivalence resonated deeply with such artists as Ansel Adams, Minor White, Georgia O’Keeffe, and others. For many years, I, too, believed in equivalence and strived to achieve it in my own work—with mixed success. I no longer do. In fact, I now believe that the most profitable way to engage in creative work—photographic or other—is to ignore completely the goal of equivalence: the goal of striving to make others feel—to “relive”—exactly what I have experienced and what it meant to me.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word “expressive” as (among other things) “effectively conveying meaning or feeling.” In this sense, equivalent photographs are expressive in a narrow and specific way: they express not just any meaning or feeling, but a photographer’s own authentic meanings or feelings. Put another way, a photograph that expresses just aesthetic appeal or any meaning the photographer did not in fact feel, is not an “equivalent,” no matter how successful it may be by any other measure.

Further, let’s not ignore the very high bar set in the definition above, which requires expressive art to not just convey meaning or feeling, but to do so effectively. To convey a meaning effectively, both artist and beholder of art must share an understanding of that meaning and recognize the ways this meaning can be conveyed (metaphorically) in an artwork. This means that an equivalent photograph must not risk trespassing beyond the shallow and narrow range of shared meanings and feelings understood intuitively by both artist and beholder. Put another way, striving for equivalence demands that artists refrain from attempting to express in their work meanings that are highly complex, deeply personal, relying on esoteric knowledge or on having some shared life experiences, or outright ineffable.

With this realization—and given that my own interest in making art is rooted entirely in my desire to experience and to contemplate complex and personally profound meanings—the pursuit of equivalence came to be a non-starter for me and I decided to put it out of my mind when creating.

Still, despite not aspiring for equivalence, I do very much strive to express meanings and feelings in my work—not just appealing aesthetics or objective testimonies to my encounters with certain things and places. I just don’t worry too much about doing so effectively. That is, I don’t bother with whether another person will even recognize, let alone “relive” the meanings I wish to convey. Convey to whom, then? To myself.

On its face, this may seem an odd proposition. Why bother conveying meaning to the one person who ostensibly already knows it? The answer: this person in fact doesn’t know it, and may not know it if I did not make the conscious effort to distill, become mindful of, contemplate, and attempt to express this meaning—at least not beyond a simplified and superficial version of it.

This is because this person is, practically speaking, just one “tenant” in my psyche: a product of processes in my brain giving rise to the illusion of being a singular, unified entity that I sometimes casually refers to as “I” without considering that “I” is profoundly lacking in insight into most of what the rest of my brain does—most notably the (potentially deep and important) feelings and perceptions generated by other—unconscious—parts of my brain. As neuroscientist David Eagleman described it (in an interview with physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll), “The conscious part of you is like a broom closet in the mansion of the brain, and almost everything going on, you don’t have access to, and you don’t even have awareness of.”

In striving to express complex inner meanings to my “I,” I am doing two things: I prompt myself to become conscious of meanings and aspects of my experience that I may otherwise never even consider (i.e., I make myself more mindful), and I invest cognitive resources in deriving and assimilating these meanings that may otherwise be claimed by various lesser distractions. In a sense, by striving to recognize and express such complex inner meanings, I extend my consciousness—my awareness of the depth and complexity of my present experience—beyond the default range of meanings “approved” for my “I” to be aware of by automated mechanisms in my brain, sometimes referred to as attention filters.

Attention filters are mechanisms in the brain that discard the great majority of information detected by the senses and/or generated by unconscious brain processes, deeming them unimportant to bother the conscious “I” with. Attention filters also prioritize some feelings, perceptions, and responses over others, not because those other feelings and perceptions are any less important or meaningful, but because these filters have been configured by evolutionary processes aiming to maximize my odds of survival and passing on my genes. This despite my “I”s disinterest in the latter and the fact that many former existential threats are no longer so. Also, these filters did not evolve to increase my “I”s joy in such things as abstract thinking, art making, and philosophical contemplation.

Striving to express myself to myself is, therefore, a way for my “I” to free itself (at least to a degree) from the tyranny of unconscious brain processes when deciding what meaning I derive of my experiences, and to do so according to my own consciously decided priorities. In this sense, it is the same goal trained by and resulting from various forms of meditation and the practice of mindfulness: the deepening of my conscious awareness of myself and of things in the world that may inspire (sometimes great) meanings unrelated to my existential needs, by taking conscious control of my attention, directing it at will, preventing it from being hijacked by lesser distractions, and applying it deliberately where it may yield me the highest rewards.

Thus, we can say that expressive art may be most powerful when it is decidedly not equivalent by Stieglitz’s definition: not intended to convey some precise, preconceived, unambiguous meaning from one person to another. This is because the more complex and personal a meaning is, the more likely it is that others will not be able to fully (or at all) comprehend, relate to, and “relive” it, regardless of the medium used to express it. Insistence on equivalence, therefore, may prevent artists from embracing and channeling into their art the deepest personal meanings they are capable of—for the lesser reward of perhaps creating a popularly appealing product.

To turn to art to convey a prescribed and obvious meaning seems ill-conceived, if for no other reason than because equivalence of meaning may be accomplished much more effectively by way of factual use of spoken or written language than in any form of artistic production. Given that artistic expression is by nature ambiguous, I believe it is better to think of expressive art not as a mechanism for conveying “equivalent” meaning to others, but as a way of broadening, deepening, and making oneself more aware of meanings that may be found in one’s own experiences.

What about viewers of such art? What do they get from beholding a work whose meaning (to its creator) is likely beyond their ability to understand and “relive”? The answer: they get the very same value from such work that its creator did: a prompting to consider, to make, and to experience their own meanings. Indeed, we might say that the finest and most compelling works of expressive art are those that intuitively inspire their creators and beholders to seek and to strive to maximize such personal, inner meanings—not those that seek to impose an artist’s meaning on their audience regardless of whether they find this meaning interesting or relatable.

In contemplating a work of expressive art, both artists and beholders must ask themselves the same question: what is the deepest and most satisfying meaning I can find in this artwork? Indeed, each of us must accustom ourselves to ask this question not just once but each time we create or behold a work of art. This is because our sense of meaning is not a fixed quantity; it may be affected by such factors as our mood on a given day, our knowledge and understanding of art, of the world, and of ourselves at a given time, our life experiences, our level of emotional maturity. Consider how many people may behold a given work of art and find no meaning at all in it, whereas others may consider it a work of genius. It seems to me the most fruitful attitude toward art is to aspire to be among the latter group (and this has nothing at all to do with whether the work’s creator was in fact a genius).

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I am certain that no person looking at my work can imagine exactly what it was like to me to make it: the experiences that led up to it, filtered through my own personality, mood, feelings, and thoughts; the emotions experienced in the course of first conceiving and later producing it; and the feelings aroused in me when I look at my own finished work (sometimes multiple times after I considered it finished but later felt moved to take further). This type of equivalence, or even something just close to it, is not what I expect—or have any right to expect—of my audience.

I urge you to ask yourself each time you see one of my works what it means to you—to the person that you are, with your own sensibilities, life experiences, emotional makeup, beliefs: the immensely complex tapestry of factors that make you, you. Before anything else, I hope my work tempts you to extract whatever meaning you may find in it that is most rewarding and elevating to you.

Of course, you may also consider it interesting to attempt to imagine what my works may mean to me, if you suspect that this knowledge may inform or even enhance your own impressions. If so, I am grateful and consider it an honor. But please recognize that these impressions, too, would most likely be as much a product of your own mind as accurate estimates of the meanings I attempted to convey—to myself