Should You Stay or Should You Go?

Humans are interesting creatures...this past week I had what started out as a depressing experience but ended up as an opportunity with vast potential. The entire process really made me think about how often we fight to protect the status quo in situations that fundamentally will never be what we want them to be. It's sort of the opposite of that old Groucho Marx joke "I don't want to be part of a club that would accept people like me as a member." Maybe we have some primitive need to be part of the club...even when it doesn't work for us. 

One of the ways I figured out the right solution was to face a few hard questions: 

1. Am I working as hard as I can on this situation? If the answer is no...then maybe I am not really committed to it. 

2. Does the situation (with the people involved) have the potential to become what I need?

3. What will be lost if I walk away? 

Honestly...the answers helped me understand that the time had come to move on. The amazing part was as soon as I faced that decision...and chose it...then all kinds of alternatives started coming to  mind. I realized I was so fixed on making a bad solution work, that I had closed myself off to all the other amazing possibilities. 

Let's face it anywhere you have humans, you'll have conflict. The issue at hand wasn't some massive thing in my life, but I have reached a point where I don't want to spend any more time making bad solutions work. I think the same is true with making art, relationships...you name it...winning the argument isn't the same as making the right choice.

Day Twenty-Three: To The End of Victory

Saturday, February 23rd: Where the road leads you.

This post is done with the assumption that you may have today off...or at least a few free hours. If Saturday is your big work day...accept my apologies!

My husband and I have a ritual we call "to the end of Victory" which is named after a drive we took on Victory Blvd - taking it all the way until it ended. There was some thought that "hey, it goes west, so it must end at the ocean." Needless to say, it didn't, but the ensuing trip was a lot of fun as we watched neighborhoods and cultures change.

My challenge for you today is to select a street and take it from its beginning to its end. You could select a long one or a short one...but see where it takes you and document those changes. One of my favorite trips of this kind was when we started south on Los Robles Avenue in Pasadena, which then turned into Atlantic Blvd, which turned into Eastern Blvd, which turned into Garfield, which turned into Cherry which landed us a block from the ocean - from the mountains to the ocean in one afternoon was really fun.

Have fun...oh, and if you don't have a car...take a bus to the end of the line.

If you've just joined us, February is a 28 day creativity challenge with a new "prompt" each day to get you thinking in new ways. The goal is to just have fun, don't try to control too much, feel free to use a cell phone or any camera that's easy for you. Don't worry about the end results. With each prompt you can take it literally or not, you can wing it, google it, ask for people's opinions...whatever you want to do is perfect. Bottom line - it's supposed to be fun, there are no right or wrongs.

Day Twenty-Two: Ages of Man

Friday, February 22nd: Time Changes Everything

Earlier this month I had you use the eye-level you had as a child...well today I'd like to take that concept further and have you photograph from the changes that our mindset brings. Photograph as if you're 10 years old, then 21, then 33, then 56 and finally 87. Some of those are within your lifespan, and some will probably be older, so you'll have a chance to use both your memory and your imagination. Keep in mind that what was (or is going to be) important to you was very different at each age...so that should impact what and how you make images. 

If you've just joined us, February is a 28 day creativity challenge with a new "prompt" each day to get you thinking in new ways. The goal is to just have fun, don't try to control too much, feel free to use a cell phone or any camera that's easy for you. Don't worry about the end results. With each prompt you can take it literally or not, you can wing it, google it, ask for people's opinions...whatever you want to do is perfect. Bottom line - it's supposed to be fun, there are no right or wrongs.

Compromise and Limitation

This weekend I read an interesting article about a young girl, with a disease that leaves her unable to feel pain. Unfortunately, this is not the same as being unable to be hurt...quite the opposite in fact. It turns out that the ability to feel pain plays an enormous part in our survival. It's ironic that we spend our lives trying to avoid pain and it turns out that it's an essential component of staying alive. Pain lets us know when we are damaging the container we live in. The article got me wondering if there's a creative equivalent to this idea.

By that I mean something that has this interesting duality - where the thing we avoid is really the path of our salvation. The only creative equivalent I could think of is the idea of limitation. We often think that we'd be so much more creative if only we had more... (fill in the blank). Yet is it through the use of boundaries that we find we can truly focus our energies in a way that allows us to go beyond what we might do with unlimited resources.

Our limitations often sharpen the edge of our reality - they force us to look at that which we want to avoid - in a way limitations allow us to really triumph - because, if used correctly, they narrow our field of possibilities and that allows us to really look at what's left. In a way, we do better with the compromises we make when faced with our limitations. In reducing the possibilities, we are often able to make more use of the material that's left. To see it without all of the external visual noise.

Exercise: Focus through Limitation

Here's a way to make this idea literal... cut a small window in a black piece of paper and hold it up to the world as a "viewer." Make sure that the paper is big enough so that there's at least 3-4 inches on each side of the window...we want to make sure that it's really isolating the view. Now try using this to reduce your "world view" in multiple situations - everything from landscapes to portraits. 

Become Someone Else

Today I decided to become someone different. I left my car at home (big step for L.A.) transferred my purse and camera bag to a day pack, and walked to the nearest Metro. Strange thing is, this is actually going back to my roots. My parents were New Yorkers and didn't drive, so I spent my childhood years on public transit. I grew up watching the world go by while cooling my cheek on a bus window more times than I can count. Fast forward a few (ha!) decades and I'm back to where I started - trying to look cool and secretly watching people's reflections.

As we get older - or even as we get more proficient as artists - we work hard to make our lives more comfortable. With meticulous care we sand all the rough edges off our daily existence until we're cocooned in comfort...or at least in a prison of our own making.  In L.A. it's easy to avoid so much simply by staying in our A/C'd cars - we grumble at traffic - but it's nothing compared to sitting by the side of the road waiting for the bus. So it's important to not allow ourselves to lose touch with life outside our "walls."

Today's trip grew out of the new work I've been doing as a photo illustrator - I knew that a visit downtown was essential and I must say it was a great experience to spend the day in such a different, visually rich environment. My challenge to you is to find your own way to do the same. Get out of your routine, be someone else for a hour, an afternoon...a day and see where it takes you. 

To take your own daytrip in downtown L.A., take a Metro to the 7th Street exit. Get out towards Figeroa street and walk south to Hotel Figeroa. This is a great location full of Moroccan style with a touch of "old California." Afterwards, walk over to Grand Avenue for the public Central Library at 5th, then cross the street to check out the Biltmore Hotel...you'll recognize it from many films. At that point you're at Pershing Square and can take the Metro to Union Square. From there...you've got Olivera Street, City Hall, Little Tokyo...you get the idea.  Have fun.

In Praise of Small Towns: Rediscovering Your Roots

For the past week I've been visiting my hometown and it has enveloped my bruised grown-up self with a warm mix of community and nostalgia. It's a small town in northern California, the kind where ex-cheerleaders slowly go to seed over the decades and your friends think you're more brilliant than you really are. Where the slow lazy days of summer get you out of your car and onto a bike. Where strangers say hello as they pass by on the street and everyone gives up the right of way at an intersection...except for young guys in pickup trucks...but they're that way everywhere. Most days are highlighted with the pleasant surprise of running into friends or relatives and you often find a bag of home grown tomatoes on your doorstep from a neighbor.  Hard to believe? I totally agree...but it does exist and I'm being wooed by it. 

When I was growing up I couldn't wait to leave and get on with my life. Now I return two to three times a year on holidays, or when needed. As a kid I was oblivious to the incredible beauty of the surroundings. An agricultural center (rice and almonds), the fields put on a rhythmic and constant series of changing views. Over time, each visit home was also punctuated by pilgrimages to remembered sites. As the years went by the sites evolved and recording those changes became a more central interest in my creative life. 

What I love about L.A. is how much variety it has. On one street I can go through Japan, Korea, Mexico, El Salvador, India...it's a movable feast. I like being able to find the last letterpress printer, seeing great art whenever I want and the first run of that obscure foreign film. It's been my home for a long time and I love telling its stories. 

But small towns have indie bookstores, accessible music scenes, real bike paths and a sense of connection to the people around you that I find soothing to the soul. It's said "you can't go home again" but in many ways home itself moves forward to meet you as you continue on your own path. New faces inhabit most of my old haunts...but the former imprint does remain and so the experience becomes this interesting blend of the new and old - connecting to my younger (wilder) self without the intensity of the actual experience.


I fully understand that a big part of my gratitude at this homecoming comes from being somewhere other than the stage of my recent troubles...but what I've truly gotten from this experience is the reminder that there are many ways to live our lives...with many paths to happiness. It was very important to realize that my current life is not the only one - in a way it's much like my experience with creativity - learning to go beyond the idea of reality that my brain has mapped out becomes a pathway to peace and happiness.

How To Stay Creative in Tough Times

I've been in education for the past 15 years...and it's no secret that times are tough for the arts in education. Recently, that issue has struck much closer to home and I'm in the process of trying to figure it out. So many questions immediately came to my mind: how am I going to stay creative, what happens now,  and more importantly, how do I make sense of this experience - give it meaning?  I think we all  struggle with what happens in difficult times - economic or otherwise.  Here's a few things that I'm trying, which hopefully will help you stay creative through the curve balls life throws us.

The first one, oddly enough, has been gratitude. I feel grateful for everything I've gotten in the past, but I also feel grateful for the sense of connection I have to everyone around me. I'm not the only person that this is happening to . . . in many ways it's sort of the human condition. Filling yourself with a sense of gratitude tends to create a sense of solidness, which is what I find I really need right now.

Next, what to do with the feelings?  Well maybe try not avoiding them. The weird thing about creativity is that, while I don't think it's a fragile flower,  I do think it's a muscle and it's somehow connected to a sense of openness and a willingness to stay aware. So, not avoiding the feelings -  experiencing them, is part of staying present.  I'm realizing that it's okay. . . it's okay to feel not okay.

Finally, finding a way to make the experience meaningful has led me to ask, can I make art about the experience? That's my next goal for my growth as an artist - to find a way to be more personal about the stories I'm telling. It seems to me that telling a story about finding one's way in a difficult world is something that we all need.

I thought I'd finish up with some thoughtful and encouraging quotes - Winston Churchill was a real fighter, and in tough times that's what we need...so I'm starting with him:


"If you're going through hell...keep going."

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."

"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
Winston Churchill

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."

"Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself."

Alice Walker

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another."
Anatole France

"If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living."
Gail Sheehy

"Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

"To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom."
Bertrand Russell

"March on. Do not tarry. To go forward is to move toward perfection. March on, and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life's path."
Khalil Gibran

"We are always in transition. If you can just relax with that, you'll have no problem."
Trungpa Rinpoche

"Nothing and no one is fixed. Whether the reality of change is a source of freedom for us or a source of horrific anxiety makes a significant difference."
Pema Chodron



I chose this week's image because The Blue Bird of Happiness was one of my favorite books as a kid.  Blue Bird flour is a prime ingredient in Navajo fry bread (which always makes me happy). Here's an article about it. 

Money Does Not Equal Creativity

When you think about people's  early films...there's a certain zest to them at that point and I think part of the reason is it really is important to have to deal with compromises in creativity. When you have every resource available to you, it often means that all you do is follow your first path, the first thing you thought of and you lose the magic of discovery.

Here's a good example - I was in a Kamikaze show, which you can read about in this previous post - and I knew I really wanted to do something different, still tied to who I am and what I do, but with a different quality. I wasn't quite sure what that was, but I knew it was out there somewhere. I also knew I didn't want it to be about a traditional approach to photography, where you take the image and then you put it in a frame...I didn't want it to go there. 

I've always loved handmade papers and I think a good technique when working creatively is to drift towards the things that inspire you.  With paper, I love the tactile quality of it...especially handmade paper - I love the irregularity of it. I'm still amazed that we live like Pharaohs...think about how hard it was for the average person to be able to record their thoughts or create something on paper...anyway...I digress. 

As I said, I had this idea...I really wanted the image to almost come "through" the paper...I was thinking it should be very light and so I tried some great handmade paper that I'd had for ages, found an image and ran it through. Initially it wasn't impressive - but then I saw it back lit, with the light coming through it ... it was just astounding. "OMG this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to do these images and then I'm going to put them on light boxes." Then I thought "OMG, where am I going to get a bunch of light boxes? I called around to see if I could rent them easily - I didn't want to spend a ton of money. The show needed to be a creative endeavour, I didn't want it to be about "Oh, let's drop another grand." 

So...I kept working and eventually moved into a different kind of image. I've always loved the way a bed looks in the morning, before it gets made, where it has that imprint of what happened that night. Loved the abstract quality of it as well...it's just sort of this shining thing. I thought, "okay great, I'll photograph that and just print it really light as if the light was coming through it." So I did a couple of those...and it just didn't move me either. Finally, taking some of my own advice, I thought well, what if instead of making it very light, I make it very dark, I just sink it into the paper instead of wanting it to lift out of the paper. I did the first print...and it was love instantaneously. 

I'm really happy with my new direction and you know, if I had unlimited funds...I would have just sent some of "daddy's money" over to make light boxes. That's why I think it's important to have restrictions. They make us more creative...they make us come up with more solutions. You don't find salvation through a new lens, computer...whatever, you find it in the everyday struggle to deal with the realities life sends us.




One of my happiest re-discoveries in this process was the paper shop McManus & Morgan Paper. It's located over by McArthur Park in LA.  Gary Wolin is the owner and here's a great video, Ink&Paper, about his business and the Aardvark Letterpress next door - which is the last letterpress printer in LA.

ink&paper from Ben Proudfoot on Vimeo.

Change and Being a Photographer

Tomorrow is my birthday...woohoo...but seriously, I'm wondering how I ended up all the way down this road. I was sure that by twenty-seven I would feel like a grown-up and have it all figured out. Yeah... Right... Hmmmmmm. 

I got into photography in a very strange way. It was at the University of Chicago, Billings Hospital. I'd been hired as a projectionist because Billings was a teaching hospital and they showed a lot of slides. It could often be pretty dry stuff - and occasionally, I'd hear "next ... next ... NEXT" because I'd dozed off to slumberland amidst slides of rare bone disease. Eventually, this grew boring and the only way to get a pay raise was to move to a different job - and the only opening was as a photographer. What a cool gig! I did everything from process film (E2 line) to photograph architecture. It was the first time I realized that you could have a job that wasn't boring - hell, it was completely different almost every day. 

Shortly after this job I ended up returning to school and studying photography. At that time, the process of becoming a good photographer involved studying with the best you could find, and then spending the next several decades perfecting those skills. Now, it's a much different gig, much more like surfing. You grab a wave and ride it for a while...then you've got to work to get back out to the next one, ride it in...and so on. It's not too bad for me, I really get bored quickly, and like learning new things. 

The question is often asked, what's next for photography? In some part, that's why I'm doing this blog, it's part of my search for new ways to define what I'm doing (and what I should be teaching). I think the biggest change is that we're not going to be narrow anymore. The new creature that calls themselves a photographer will be a "jack of many trades." They will have to embrace change, and spend more time looking forward than back. 

In my interview with Dan Shepherd, he mentioned an interesting quote on conservation. "Conservation is the process of managing change." There's more to it, of course, but I think it applies to photography as well. A big part of being a photographer used to be as a gatekeeper for technology - but  in many ways that was because being a photographer was about the camera. Our energies must shift and I believe photography is now about managing the changing visual world around us. Yes, this will involve integrating various technologies, but how we tell our stories, where we focus our energies - that will still remain our most important role. Consider it a given that the method in which those activities happen will change, and continue to change, so there's no point in worrying about it. 

On the wall in my studio I've taped up the last Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. They've woken up and found that it had snowed the previous night.  

Hobbes: "Everything familiar has disappeared! The world looks brand new!

Calvin: "A New Year! A fresh clean start!

Hobbes: "It's like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on!"

Calvin: "A day full of possibilities!"

Calvin: "It's a magical world, Hobbes ol' buddy...let's go exploring!"

Frankly, that's how I intend to experience this next year...let's go exploring!