Lois Greenfield on creativity

credit: Lois Greenfield

I have a book of Lois Greenfield's dance photography out from the library at present. The photos are pretty darn cool, though I don't deeply love them. What I found fascinating was the included interview, especially her discussion of the distinction between depicting and creating:

"I realized that although people are used to seeing carefully crafted images which glorify the dance, these pictures don't tell you anything more; they don't develop, extend, explore. People would look at one of my pictures of Baryshnikov in a spectacular leap ten feet off the ground and say, 'What a great photograph!', but I knew it wasn't; it was merely a great dance moment competently captured...

I later wrote on Duane Michals — whose outlook has had a profound effect on me--on Man Ray and on Lucas Samaras, all photographers who invent, rather than depict....

When I was in college I went to hear him [Michals] speak at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this iconoclastic lecture he said to a crowd of Minor White/zone system enthusaists, 'If all your life means to you is water running over rocks, then photograph it, but I want to create something that would not have existed without me.'"

- Lois Greenfield
in interview with William A. Ewing

This idea that creativity means changing something through your experience of it-- making something new, rather than just capturing something that already existed--really engages me.

Greenfield has an online portfolio of her photography here, for the interested.