balenciaga fall/winter 2013

Ideas for breaking out of a creative drought

• Hesitation is destruction.
• Addition is often a process of subtraction.
• Go as deep as you can with what you’re doing.
• Let your camera follow your life instead of having your life follow the camera.
• Think of photographs as compliments and love letters.
• Relationships are more important than photographs.
• Rejection is normal, don’t be afraid of it.
• Welcome failure because it leads to growth.
• Don’t worry about the answers, you’ll never find them until you embrace the questions.
• Success is a byproduct of something bigger than itself so don’t pursue it.
• Confront your anxieties and fears by leaving your comfort zone.
• Don’t repeat yourself.
• Don’t worry about your work being bad or good – completion is all that matters.
• Stay away from imitating others (know the difference between inspiration and imitation).
• Know yourself.
• Challenge everything and do so with humility.
• Your subconscious is like a secret factory, if you feed it good things than good things will probably come out.

• Stop thinking and go out and produce and produce and produce…
• Two weeks with a great mentor is probably equivalent to two years of school.
• What you surround yourself with will often dictate who you become.
• Photography is not about photography (photographs about photographs are boring).
• Examine your intentions carefully and stay true to the original idea.
• Make friends with people who aren’t photographers.
• Becoming a “great” photographer is a lifetime achievement.
• Sentimentality is the opposite of cynicism and try to keep both out of your work.
• Let your work breathe. When you have completed it, lock it away and come back to it at a later date with fresh eyes.
• Sometimes you need to let go in order to have something return.
• Everything is subjective.
• People are constantly re-writing their memory.
• Know when and when not to show your work to people. Give ongoing projects a healthy incubation period before sharing them.
• Go for walks when you feel stuck.
• Fake it until you make it!
• Always trust your gut.

- Peter McCollough

Henri Rousseau, le douanier

My favourite painting of the Kunstmuseum Basel; negro attacked by a jaguar, 1910 Henri Rousseau. 

Henri Rousseau was largely seen as a curiosity -- a naïve, unlearned, uncultured and unsophisticated painter -- but he grew to be a fashionable curiosity, with special interest by Pablo Picasso the writer Guillaume Apollinaire. He was autodidact, "a prodigiously intuitive person", but certainly not uneducated, he himself claimed he had "no teacher other than nature". 

how come, jeroen koolhaas?

wondering about the strong presence of architecture in pradas real fantasies, the name jeroen koolhaas might be the hint. 

crossroads of pot d'étain