Trust the Process and Forget About the Outcome

I recently had a dry spell of creativity, culminating in a 133-day period (yes, I counted), without taking a single photograph, not including using my iPhone. One hundred and thirty-three days. That is exceptionally poor as a photographer and it definitely was not helping me to move forward with my practice. I place the blame squarely on the combination of post-degree burnout and lockdown-related ennui. I simply could not face picking up the camera.

Despite being temporarily camera averse, I still wanted to create something, anything, so I began to create some cyanotypes. The simplicity and beauty of cyanotypes, for me at least, is that it is a slow process. The chemical process is in charge here, not the artist, so having to patiently wait for the UV rays and ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide to work their magic is a wonderful antidote to the frenetic, greedy rush of the digital shoot-edit-share process.

Not wanting to make the standard botanical cyanotypes, I decided to create prints of the waveform of my voice captured during an interview. I created two types, one where the image was inverted during the processing stage of creating the digital negative and a non-inverted version. The paper was treated with the solution a few months ago in a dark cupboard and kept in a light-tight environment. Not having access to a darkroom meant the solution was applied in a less than ‘perfect’ fashion, but I’ve grown to love the uneven application and the effect it has had on the prints. 

Waiting for the image to materialise was quite meditative; there was nothing I could do to hurry the process along, so I waited patiently. Whilst the prints were sitting in the late summer sunshine, I was not berating myself about the lack of progress being made in my ongoing project, but I was debating whether or not to expose the prints for another minute or two.

Whilst I was washing the prints, I was not thinking about posting the results on social media but trying to decide whether to tone them with tea and if so, which tea? Mint? Lemon? Builder’s? When the prints were drying I was only thinking about what other paper types to try. In short, I was not thinking about the outcome at all, but the process.  Instead of tying myself up in knots trying to consider how creating these prints fit into my practice and therefore trying to justify the time spent creating them, I will simply enjoy the act of making something. Children aren’t taught to look at the bigger picture, to analyse why they coloured the car blue instead of red, or why they used pencil crayons instead of felt tip pens, they are allowed the freedom to simply enjoy the act of colouring in a picture.

So, for now, I will continue to take a childish, guilt-free approach to creating work and not stress over the fact that I have yet to take any project-related photographs. After all, time spent creating is never wasted, right?

Self portrait, from a series on identity and representation