Writing

Finding Energy, Not Just a Model: The Art of Intentional Collaboration

Finding Energy, Not Just a Model: The Art of Intentional Collaboration

My wife said something to me over the weekend that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. She said, "You're very intentional with the people you work with on creative projects."

She isn't wrong, and ever since she said it, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, and mulling over the reasons behind it.

When I started learning photography back in Olympia WA, oh so many years ago, I was somewhat desperate to find people to photograph.  I remember, asking a couple I knew, if they would be willing to pose for a few photos for me to practice on.  They were polite about it, but they turned me down.  I remember getting off the phone with them and being very embarrassed. But I kept going, and kept practicing.  I might not have actual people to photograph, but I would buy flowers from the store, or I would take photos of a yoga class being held at the gym I owned.  I took a lot of candid portraits of friends and family members.  Basically I would take any and every opportunity to use my camera that I could.

That was over 10 years ago, and I've pressed the shutter button on my camera thousands of times now.  Thankfully, I eventually found people to work with, but I have learned just how important it is that you match creative energy with a person, because when you don't it makes creating something special all the harder.

This morning I saw a video, posted on Instagram by David Suh.

David, in my personal opinion, is one of the most talented, patient, persistent, and dedicated photographers I have seen in a very long time.  I don't know him personally, but he seems like a genuine and caring individual.  That said, I have noticed, in some of his videos, he'll work with someone who is uncomfortable being in front of the camera.  David is a master at helping folks find a pose that works for them, but helping those folks find that pose, takes energy. And while that works for David, it doesn't really work for me, and that's ok.

I like being selective with who I work with, I like dedicating my energy to the creative project, I like focusing on the art.  My way isn't better than David's, and David's isn't better than mine. They're just different, and I think that is what matters more then anything, because we live in a world filled with copy cats and repeated viral trends.  So those of us who chose to be different have the opportunity for real creativity and unique art.

That's why, when Morgan asked me a few months ago, if I wanted to do a blood shoot with her, I was more then willing and incredibly excited to do so.

I bought some blood from Reynolds, and a new light from B&H and prepped, best I could, for a very cool photo shoot.

Believe it or not, finding photo inspo for a blood shoot is hard to find. Most of the images I was able to find were either rakishly armature, or overtly sexualized. Either way, I couldn't really use anything I found for much inspiration.  Thankfully, I consider myself a halfway decent artist, with an impressively active imagination.  So I had a rough draft, in my minds eye, for what I wanted the photos to look like.

Morgan, for her part, is a wonderful friend and model, who takes direction well, is incredibly patient, and always willing to try something weird. We shot for two hours, and we got some incredible shots, that I will share later, but here are a few BTS shots that show a little of the chaos and blood shed that happened on Sunday.

Stay tuned, for more to come.

by Adam Scott

I'm Sorry - Overcoming Anger

I'm Sorry

Yesterday, I had a conversation with my wife.  I apologized to her.  Not because I had committed some terrible sin, but because I recently noticed how angry and grumpy I had been as of late.  Yes, yes, I know... You all have come to expect a certain amount of cynicism and sarcasm from me, and I promise, those things are not going anywhere, but, my anger at the state of things had moved away from a healthy disrespect for all things present, and started resembling more of an unhealthy personality trait.  My poor therapist has had to endure more then one session that included me just rage talking against "the machine", and while those can be, occasionally, useful, I wasn't actually working on anything productive.  I was just complaining about a bunch of things that I had no control over, and allowing those things to take purchase inside me, and start making decisions on my behalf.

I have always had a lot of anger and rage inside me, so it's sometimes easy for me to give into the feelings, but I'm not an angry teenager anymore who isn't in a safe place to express themselves, and I have worked hard to be able to communicate my feelings without putting holes in walls, like I did when I was 17.

So, I apologized to my wife, who has patiently listened to, and endured so many of my long rants about religion, politics, human beings stupidity, and AI.  She deserves some sort of award for all she has put up with, or maybe a sushi date followed by frozen yogurt.

The point of all of this is, I am going to try to be less angry with *gestures at world* and work to be more positive about things.  I've heard that you see what you focus on, and I have certainly been focusing on negative things recently, and as a consequence, all I see are more negative things, most of which are things I have no control over, and can not change.

Now, I will tell you what I told my wife.  I am aware this change will NOT happen over night.  As I mentioned before, anger is deeply embedded within my soul, and I am not going to stop rolling my eyes

at the absurdity that is the human race, along with all its decisions.  But, I am going to try to not focus in on it, like a sniper about to take a shot without any bullets.  Because, like the sniper without ammo, that would be unproductive in nature. I can focus on all the things going wrong all I want, but at the end of the day, I can't change anything.

How am I going to do this?  Good question... I have no idea.  Right now I am trying to me more aware of when I do it, so I can pivot away from it.  This text exchange between me and my wife is a good example of me trying to pivot. And, like the meme, I imagine I am going to be saying WOOOOOOOOSAAAAHHHHHHHH, a lot!

Why?  Because, yes, there are a lot of very stupid things happening in the world right now, but I don't want those things to dictate my actions.  How a person stands against darkness defines their character. And I would like to hope that I will not be thought of as an angry 17 year old who put holes in the wall of his parents house.  I would like to hope that I, personally, can face the darkness without allowing that darkness to consume me, turning me into a different kind of darkness.

So, as I did with my wife, I'm sorry.  I'm sorry for all the rants, complaints, and negative energy.  I'm going to try and do better, to see better, and to live better.

Wish me luck.

by Adam Scott

Ink, Wax, and the Lost Art of Letter Writing

Ink, Wax, and the Lost Art of Letter Writing

Let me tell you something true about myself, a thing I don't say lightly because the truth has a way of sitting in your chest like a stone you've been carrying so long you forgot it was ever heavy.

I was never cool.

Not in the effortless, magnetic, people-just-gravitate-toward-you way. Not even in the weird, ironic, so-uncool-it-loops-back-around way that becomes its own currency in certain coffee shops. No. I mean I was the kid at recess inventing elaborate solo games because the alternative was standing near other children and hoping, desperately, that proximity would be mistaken for belonging. It was not. Elementary school is a brutal ecosystem, honestly closer to a nature documentary about pack behavior than anything resembling civilization, and I was reliably at the bottom of the food chain.

Middle school didn't improve my standing. High school gave me the gift of anger as a coping mechanism, which is the kind of gift that arrives without a receipt and ruins several holidays. On my best days I was chaotic, a live wire someone had coiled into a desk chair and told to pay attention to algebra. On my worst days I was something darker, something I'm not proud of, something that lives in the past where it belongs. I grew up convinced, bone-deep, that I was less than. That the default human experience included a dignity and ease I had somehow been issued without, like arriving at a camping trip to discover everyone else got a tent.

I am forty-five years old. I am, by most reasonable metrics, a functional and occasionally delightful adult. And I am still surprised when someone looks at something I've done and says, that's cool.

Still. Every time. Like a man who keeps touching the stove to confirm it's hot.

A couple years ago, I started writing letters.

Not emails. Not texts. Not voice memos or DMs or any of the thousand frictionless ways we've invented to lob words at each other without actually touching anything. Letters. By hand. On paper. With a fountain pen, which is, and I say this with complete affection, an absolutely cool instrument to choose in the twenty-first century, a tool that requires patience, practice, and acceptance that sometimes the ink will do whatever it wants and you will simply live with that.

It started because my brother lost one of his children. There's no elegant way to write that sentence and I'm not going to try. Grief at that scale is a country with no roads in, you can't drive to it, you can't GPS your way through someone else's devastation. But I could write. So I did. Every week. A letter, sealed and stamped and dropped into the mail, because in all that unbearable silence I hoped, not knew, not guaranteed, just hoped, that something tangible arriving in a mailbox might carry a few grams of you are not alone with it.

I kept writing after that. I write friends and family every Sunday now, two or three letters. I joined a site called Postcrossing, which connects strangers across the planet for the express purpose of mailing each other postcards. I have sent postcards to people in Germany, Japan, Brazil, places I may never see, from a person they will never meet, carrying nothing but the small strange proof that someone in Atlanta sat down on a Sunday and thought I will send a piece of myself to a stranger and trust the postal service with it.

I have not received letters back. This is fine. This is not the point.

The point is the deliberateness of it. The point is that in a world engineered to move fast, to scroll, swipe, consume, refresh, repeat, there is something almost radical about sitting down and saying, I am going to spend the next hour entirely in service of another person's joy. No algorithm. No engagement metric. No reply button. Just ink and intention and the peculiar faith that the mail will figure out the rest.

And I have, I'll admit, gotten into it in the way a certain type of person gets into things, which is to say: completely, joyfully, with no obvious exit strategy.

I designed my own stationery. I print it on paper that has actual weight to it, paper that says I took this seriously. I write with fountain pens and inks in colors with names like Midnight Blue and Autumn Oak, which is either romantic or ridiculous and I have decided it is both simultaneously. I seal the letters with wax, real wax, melted with a little brass stamp, because if you're going to do something, do the thing. I have four wax seals in my collection. A fifth is incoming. I go to the post office and I ask for interesting stamps, the ones with birds or national parks or dead jazz musicians, because the envelope is part of the letter, the whole thing is the message from the moment it lands in someone's hands.

It is, as hobbies go, quiet. Deliberate. Stubbornly analog. I did it alone in my office every Sunday without ceremony, without announcement, the way I have always done the things that mattered most to me, quietly, in case someone noticed and decided it was weird.

And then my wife noticed.

She noticed, and she didn't say it was weird. She said she was thinking about starting her own letters. She said she'd been watching me disappear into my office on Sunday mornings with my pens and my wax and my careful rituals, and she thought, maybe she wanted that too. She was going to write to a friend in California. She might join me on Sundays.

I waited for the punchline. I am a man who spent a significant portion of his developmental years being set up for punchlines, and I know the shape of them, the little pause before the gotcha drops. I waited.

It didn't come.

She meant it. She genuinely, actually meant it.

Now listen. I have accumulated a small and fiercely loved circle of people who think I'm alright. My wife is at the center of that circle. She is, objectively, a person with excellent judgment. But forty-five years of bone-deep less than doesn't just dissolve because logic demands it, and so when the woman who knows me best, every chaotic, ink-stained, wax-dripping, stamp-obsessed corner of me, looks at something I do quietly, alone, without expectation, and says I want to do that too —

That lands somewhere different. That lands somewhere that's hard to name but easy to feel.

I'm not used to being cool. Probably never will be. But if someone has to look at me over a Sunday morning cup of coffee and think yeah, that guy's onto something — I'm glad, more than I know how to say, that it's her.

by Adam Scott