How to Alchemize Your Photography (turn life experiences into gold)
Today we’re going to talk about how to alchemize your photography and turn your life experiences into gold.
We talk about the creative process often on this channel and I think if you can learn and understand these concepts, you’ll never run out of material for your art.
Whether you engage in photography, traditional or digital art, music, or social media, it all applies.
This is because creativity, in a nutshell, is an extension, an interpretation, or even an alchemization of the human experience.
Let me explain.
Life Imitates Art, Art Imitates Life
We’ve all heard the popular quote before: “Art imitates life.”
This is true in both the literal and metaphorical sense.
The best works of art are often based on real experiences.
Think about your favorite movies, tv shows, and songs.
They all have powerful underlying reasons why you like them so much - that’s because they’re relatable.
If there weren’t an element or aspect that we could relate or hold on to, we wouldn’t be so attracted to it.
And even if the thing in the book didn’t ever actually happen to us, we can still empathize and understand the emotions, the struggles, the pains of the main character.
So that’s one way art imitates life.
But what about life imitating art?
This one is a bit less obvious, but it happens all the time.
Throughout our day there are flashes of life imitating art everywhere.
It could be the advertisements and billboards for some new movie or album.
It could be as simple as your friend pointing out a situation, saying “Hey, that’s just like in that one show.”
But in the truest sense, we see life imitating art in the way we live our lives.
The inspiration we take from certain characters or stories that motivate us to live our life in a certain way.
Take Marvel for example, and how the characters and stories have influenced generations to live their lives a certain way.
Or Dragon Ball, motivating millions to train and go to the gym or whatever.
This happens all around us 24/7.
What am I trying to get you to understand here?
This first step is just to illustrate how interconnected art and life are.
It’s so much so that the phrase could be better said, “Life is art, art is life.”
Make sense?
Now let’s move on to utilizing this concept to further push our creativity.
Passive vs Active Strategies
Now that we understand this concept, how do we take and apply it to our creativity to make more better art?
First let’s talk about the difference between passive and active strategies.
A passive strategy is unconscious or subconscious.
You’re doing the whole “art imitates life” thing, but not intentionally.
Rather you’re just making your music, painting your pictures, floating by, and not thinking about it too much.
An active strategy makes conscious use of this concept.
Meaning, you see and view every and anything that happens to you as an opportunity for creativity.
Both work, and there are fantastic artists that do either method, but a passive strategy doesn’t require much teaching.
It’s rather intuitive and it’s what most of us are used to, as we’ve grown up doing creative stuff.
An active strategy however, requires understanding the concepts we just talked about and applying it when needed to never run out of ideas.
Let me give you some examples for why an active strategy is useful:
It lets you slow down and not rush the creative process
A common trend within the music industry is a new young artist who puts out an amazing first album.
The songs are fresh, they’re real and relatable, and unique in some way.
But only a year later, the production is rushed to match the popularity of the artist, and a second album is released.
Sales wise, the album might do okay, sometimes really good, but is often not as good of an album as the first.
This is commonly referred to as the “sophomore album”.
And the reason why sophomore albums aren’t as good as the freshman album is because there simply isn’t enough life experience to make good art out of.
The first album you just had 18-20 years of your life to work with.
Your childhood, your adolescence, your first relationships, breakups, etc.
Some of the most formative and interesting times of your life get squeezed out into this first album - and that’s why it’s so good.
Whereas the sophomore album only gets a year or two to be made.
Not enough life has happened to make something good.
That’s the difference.
Now, if you’d been taking an active approach to your creativity, you’d understand this.
You’d know you need more time to create new material, you’d slow down the process despite the labels pressuring you, and you’d wait for life to let the art happen.
And obviously, I don’t know the music industry, but its complicated, and could mean you getting dropped by your label.
But right now we’re talking about this in the context of making “better” stuff.
It’s more ideal to give it more time, but sometimes artists can’t, I get it.
That was just an example of where it’d be better to apply an active strategy - not rushing because we have the bigger context of how this whole process works.
Second example: Everything is material.
This is a common phrasing for many writers.
Whether life is good or life is bad, everything is material.
Maybe you’ve just accomplished a really big goal you’ve been working towards for many years.
You can use that process and experience to write a story out of.
Maybe you’ve just gone through a breakup.
You can use the feelings, emotions, and experiences to write a song, book, whatever.
No matter the life experience, it can be used to fuel your creativity.
And that’s what’s so powerful.
That’s what we mean by alchemizing your creativity.
By viewing and seeing the events and things that happen in our life as opportunities.
Heck, they don’t even have to be your stories.
They could be things you see other people doing or observing in the world.
And an active strategy allows us to consciously make use of this.
It benefits our psyche too: anything bad that happens to you, you can look at positively, and say “It’s material”.
And then you can use it to make something with, and the art will be better in a sense because it has real life to attach to.
Make sense?
Let’s move on.
The Bigger Picture
Let’s talk about the bigger picture.
Now that we know the relationship between art and life, and have gone through some examples of the process, how do we take and apply it to our lives?
First, you gotta pick your medium.
Whether its music, art, or photography, figure out what is the medium for your creativity.
For me, it’s writing, photography, and YouTube videos.
Creating books, prints, talking about it, are all outlets for my “alchemy”.
Second, start working with what you have.
Instead of looking forward to getting new life experiences, learn to work with what you have.
Each of us has a unique inner story and collection of life experiences already.
We don’t need to go out and get searching - we’ll talk about that in a bit.
But for now, start thinking about how to create with what you already have.
Maybe start with your own story or stories that have inspired you.
You can also study other artists to see how they’ve done it.
For example, my photography zine “The Sinking Sun” was built out of my fascination for sunsets.
I’d often go on walks in my daily life during golden hour, take pictures of a variety of skies, and felt motivated to make something out of them.
So I built a book that not only showcased the beauty of these sunsets, but tried to explore why these scenes move us and connect us.
Your reason or motivation for creating something can be as complex or as simple as you want.
Third, approach new experiences with an active approach.
Now that you’ve made something and have started the creative cycle, we can start looking forward.
Of course, spend more time creating about the past - there’s an endless amount of material there.
But now it’s time to change our perspective on the world.
Start looking at new choices and decisions in life as a filter to create more and better art.
What do I mean by this?
I mean that to truly start turning our life experiences into gold, we need to view the literal life choices we make as opportunities for better work.
I do this by asking myself a simple question: “What will make for a better story?”
Or photo, or video, or art, whatever.
This question usually forces me to make difference decisions in life.
For example, in my recent trip to Japan and even Cambodia, I had multiple occasions where I questioned if I should go or not.
Most of me is down, but there’s also a small bit of doubt inside, and my anxiety gives me cold feet.
In those moments, I remind myself of the positives that will come out of taking this leap.
“This might be hard, this might go wrong, but think of all the experiences, memories, photos you’ll have when you come back.
And then think of the different things you’ll be able to do with them.
The books you can make, the stories you can tell, the prints you can put up.”
Reminding myself of that makes it easier to take forward action to have these life experiences in the first place so I can come back and alchemize them into creative gold.
Does that make sense?
That’s the final step.
Start living forwards with the intent in mind that overcoming challenges, getting out of your comfort zone, and touching grass and living more will make your art better.
If you don’t do art specifically, treat it as a self improvement thing - it all applies.
Also, don’t take this too far in the other direction and start doing dumb stuff to just make a better story.
This is not an excuse to create relationship drama or make dumb financial decisions to “tell a better story”.
That’s not what I’m talking about here.
I’m talking about the “journey” the “adventure” and even the little simple life moments.
Okay, so I hope this made sense and you got something good from it.
If you wanna help support my future trips, you can find the travel fund on my website.
You can also support me by checking out “The Sinking Sun”, my first photography zine.
And if you just wanna build a solid foundation with photography, go to Photography Essentials - it’s free.
Thanks for reading, bye.
