Plans for a new photo project have given way to an abundance of introspection lately on art and self, and how the two intertwine.  The past two years represent an incubating period for my work, a time of smaller-scale projects to keep active as the next exciting idea worked its way to my doorstep.  While far from meaningless, these images still tend to portray scenes and subject matter I enjoyed photographing.  Here I emphasize the fact that the first few sessions or rolls preceded the complete formation of the idea.

Recently, a larger idea has preceded actual photographs and I've been preparing myself for a lengthier, heavier project.  As happy as I am for the breath of fresh air and the flood of new inspiration, this project means something far beyond rolls of film and aesthetic infatuations that got me thinking.

Stretching even farther, I would say I now want to create art with far more personal meaning, work that expresses fundamental aspects of self I've previously left unexplored.  Though I consider my series of nighttime industrial scenes as well as my reclamation images fairly well-developed projects, they act much like I do in everyday life: they make compelling insights, but don't necessarily bare the soul of the artist.

Artists play many roles, but most importantly they encourage the audience to consider a subject in a different light.  Visual art challenges our assumptions and preconceptions.  It questions common ideas and images.  But what happens when we bump up against subject matter that lies outside our comfort zone.  What if, in the process of discovering the images, we find we are less comfortable than we thought with the inherent publicness of art?

The images we create are intrinsically linked to our selves, a visual representation of our thought processes.  My feeling has always been that the best work is done just outside our comfort zones.  Just like you should always apply for a few jobs you're underqualified for, you should never be afraid to challenge yourself with a new project you're not quite sure how to manage.

I'm interested to know any current or historic examples of how introverted artists approach their work.  Is personal subject matter somewhat more abstract, just as we tend to speak more abstractly to suggest at -- but still skirt around -- an issue?  What about more thoughtful, but external, content, like lonely buildings or decaying industrial structures?  Or do many artists find it easier to express themselves directly through art?  It all stretches in front of me, to be discovered over the course of an exciting new project.  You can expect lots of writing and preliminary photos in months to come.

Yesterday evening I walked home from work with a big smile on my face, feeling excited about recent goals. I suppose it all stems from a desire to be more outgoing – I'm naturally shy and reserved – but I've had a strong desire to reconnect with old friends, forge stronger relationships with new friends, and get myself and my art work out into the world.

In school, art professors stressed the importance of dismissing our shyness when interacting with the art world. One even told me having two drinks (no more, no less) at gallery openings was the key to effective networking. Laugh if you want to, but those of us who get seriously anxious about calling our friends on the weekend need to think outside the box at events that require us to project ourselves to total strangers.

While I haven't handed out business cards at too many openings lately, I have made a concerted effort to branch out in my everyday life. This week I did two things that bolstered my confidence and sense of excitement about my work. I submitted five photos to Lotta Art, an annual benefit show for Baltimore's School 33 Art Center. I feel really good about this regardless of the outcome,but if my images get chosen it will be a great opportunity for me to get out and get to know some more visual arts people around town.

Entering work into juried shows can be intimidating at first – until you realize there really is nothing to lose. If your images don't get chosen, so what? Obvious as it may sound, that concept took me a long time to internalize.

Second on my list, I just emailed a friend to talk about some brand new ideas I've had for my work. My new direction – should I choose to take it – will be much more personal than anything previous, so talking about it was just as difficult as having any other personal conversation (here we go with the shy thing again). However, once I clicked “send” I felt this great sense of excitement, as if my view of the world gained value with the act of sharing it.

Who knows, maybe it does. I've always been a somewhat private person, more comfortable discussing ideas and opinions that didn't reveal much about myself. My art has reflected the same: intellectually interesting with minimal personal risk. As I get older and work to establish myself personally and professionally in a new city, I suddenly feel a need to be more alive. I want to take risks, I want people to know more about me.

In general, I'd recommend everyone take a few more personal risks. What do any of us have to lose? On the other hand, there is so much to gain by getting yourself out there: new relationships, new opportunities, a wider network, more of your art hanging in shows.

As often happens in this town, I found myself enjoying some delicious food with a friend the other day. Also not uncommon, we got to discussing our respective careers, shifting landscapes at our offices, and our plans for the future.

The conversation made me wonder: where am I going? Does it matter? A successful career can be defined as continually working to find the best “fit.” I see a problem immediately: I don't necessarily know what that best fit is. Last night I hosted an event for our VISTA team called “Life After VISTA,” where some of our VISTA alumni returned to talk about how they prepared for the end of their year and transitioned into a professional career. One woman said “don't feel bad if you still don't know what you want to do.”

During my meal with my friend I hinted at something I haven't considered for a few years: working for myself, doing freelance jobs, and pursuing my art as a (but not the only) primary career. I talked about applying for a few grants for my own work (imagine that) so I could spend more time on my photography.

One of the college professors I learned the most from tried to give us realistic expectations: it's very difficult and very lucky to be able to forgo a “day job.” With that in mind, though...where do I fit? It's a question I've been asking for years now.

Most likely I'll choose to pursue a career somehow connected to national service. However, it's a good exercise for everyone to give some serious thought to their career from time to time. Answering the questions “where do I fit?” “what am I truly passionate about?” and “am I really happy when I wake up in the morning?” is helps us to define where we are, where we're going, and how we can direct our efforts to get the most out of our precious hours, days, and years.

Luckily for me, I have a contract that lasts until August 2009, so my career reflections aren't too rushed at this point. But come May, I can imagine I'll be thinking a lot more about how I want to proceed with my career as it relates to grant-writing, visual arts, and national service.

Today the deadline passed for the Towson ARTS Collective “Travel Exhibit: Where have you been?” Within the week I have nominated myself for the Baker Artist Awards and submitted more creative non-fiction to the Urbanite. I marked the travel exhibit deadline on my calendar and set a pop-up window to remind me two weeks in advance. I narrowed down my travel photographs to four favorites.

On Thursday, with application in hand, I decided not to send my work in. Suddenly the idea planted itself in my mind that these were just travel snapshots, and it was just coincidence that they had been taken by a photographer with a nice camera. Sure, they looked great, but that didn't make them gallery-worthy. And could I write a convincing artist statement to accompany them?

At the time, my decision seemed informed and practical. After all, if I send my work for an exhibition in the future, did I want to be remembered as that woman who sent in her honeymoon snapshots for the travel exhibit? It was only prudent to hold work that wasn't intellectually up to par.

I could have predicted the regret I'm feeling now. How often I forget, I usually have nothing to lose by applying to something. My travel pictures may or may not be worthy of hanging in a gallery, but how will I know if I don't offer them up for consideration? There's no use mourning an opportunity come and gone, really, but I do need to remember this experience for next time.

Sometimes it just gets difficult to keep marketing my work and putting it out there because it demands a certain level of egotism, self-assuredness, and determination that these images warrant the world's attention. I heard it on my first day of Introduction to Photography back in the day, and it's true: everyone wants to be a photographer, and sometimes it seems like anyone's success is more or less by chance.

I think it's important to touch on these feelings from time to time, however briefly. I'm not at a point in my life where I experience a whole lot of self-doubt, but it happens to all creative people from time to time. We need to acknowledge it and move on, knowing not every submission can be perfect but at least we're getting feedback and getting our name heard. Art isn't a perfect display, it's communication. It's taking an image and preserving it just as you saw it, making it special. And there's certainly no reason to hide your work because you don't think it's “good” enough.

I received my acceptance package from MICA in the mail on Saturday.  Despite my uncertainty about what I'd like to do after my AmeriCorps*VISTA year ends on June 24th, being accepted into a supposedly very competitive graduate program is a validating experience.  My scholarship letter cites my "outstanding qualifications" and "superior achievement in visual arts."  I may be hard on myself much of the time, but these words do manage to make me feel like perhaps the struggle of my undergraduate years and the hard work I have put in afterward was good for something.

Incidentally, my entire visual art portfolio was photography even though I concentrated in painting for my BFA.  Once again I am reminded of the intense struggle I felt every day in the painting studio.  I continually felt unable to live up to my professors' expectations and unable to compete with my peers.  How much of this came from my own high standards for myself I will never know, but I do think one professor in particular made me realize painting was not my true calling.  He was passionate, maybe even maniacal, about painting and favored students who felt -- or at least expressed themselves -- similarly.  He must have seen some sort of potential in me or he never would have tried to push me so hard, but I always ended up feeling like he was trying to wrench something out of me that just wasn't there.

In the end, I have realized (or rediscovered, since I was hell-bent on becoming a professional musician between fourth and tenth grade) that I just do not think visually.  It is why I cannot draw objects from memory and struggle to draw from a subject sitting in front of me.  It is why I painted more for the experience of the paint than I did for the images.  Maybe it is even why I often get lost, unable to visualize a map in my head.  Certainly it is why I found 4 Weeks to an Organized Life With AD/HD to be so unhelpful.

But if I'm not a visual thinker, why this continued interest in the visual arts?  Why am I still drawn to photography, and why did I submit a portfolio to a visual arts graduate program?

I really think photography allows me freedom from my inability to visualize.  I am at home behind the viewfinder because for once, my image has been laid out before me in perfect detail.  I can adjust angles and depth of field, work little by little until I have the frozen image that explains the scene exactly as I saw and felt it.  There is no other way to preserve it.  I adore photographs because they preserve a thought, a memory in a way my mind usually cannot. 

While I can always remember the tone of a voice that has called my name, photographs allow me to look into the eyes of someone I have lost.  They also evoke the spirit of a scene as I felt it at the moment I released the shutter.  While I dream of taking a sketchpad, india ink, and brushes along on an upcoming trip to Europe, I know I shouldn't even bother.  I should buy a special journal and an extra memory card.  I should take hundreds, even thousands of photographs.  I should write out all the words in my head while I'm sitting outside a cafe in Venice because this is how I will capture it.

As I continue to explore who I am, not who I convince myself to be, I am learning all over again that I think in music and eloquent words, but I see through my photographs.

This blog is about words and images, most frequently words about images.  Maybe there are some like it on the web, maybe not.  The great gift the internet has given us is ultimate control over content.  I create the content, edit it, filter it, and publish it. 

But then what happens to it?

The audience is where I lose control as a blogger, and the one major failing I see in self-published work.  Just like the zine scene, which I inhabited during my high school years, a few blogs rise to the top and gain some recognition while the rest remain adrift in the vast sea of the online universe.

For this reason and many others, I see submitting to real-life publications as a necessity to pull myself out of the crowded streets of the blogosphere and enter the more established traditional field of professional, paper publications.

The only trouble is, I am still trying to exercise that same control over content while not relinquishing total control over audience.  I pick and choose, this favorite piece of writing there, this photograph here.  I enter my work for publication only when I feel very strongly about the contest and am really invested in winning: which means, of course, I never do.

It's not about picking your favorite contest or magazine, and it's not about picking one favorite piece from six months' work.  It's about spreading your work widely as dandelion seeds and seeing what takes root.  It's about finding every opportunity that could possibly be relevent and going for it, even if it's not something terribly exciting.  It's about building a list of small accomplishments before trying for the long-reach, dream opportunity.

If there is one thing I want to take away from my short list of carefully chosen contests and publications, it is I need to do more in every way possible. I need to let as many eyes see these words and images as possible and just wait for something to stick.  And most of all, I need to keep working, keep thinking, and keep trying.

This week I started reading a book called 4 Weeks to an Organized Life With AD/HD. Usually I turn my nose up at “self-help” books, as I find the whole genre a little too new-agey and wishy-washy to take seriously, but this one caught my eye. For the first 100 pages, I felt like the authors had written a book all about me. All my emotional and practical struggles were laid out before me in plain, simple terms. I have already found myself using what I read to explain to others the difficulties I face in everyday life.

4 Weeks to an Organized Life relies heavily on the left brain/right brain concept, and explains how in a left-brained society, creative, visual, right-brained thinkers lose out. When faced with a number of thoughts or tasks, it is difficult for us to put them in a logical sequence, prioritize them, and figure out the order of the steps between Point A and Point B. This explains well my tendency to get overwhelmed easily when I have to manage multiple tasks or even one task with multiple steps. I never even realized that skill of sequencing and prioritizing came naturally to most people.

I could go on about this forever, but the point is, those first 100 pages really got me. I was sure the four-week program that followed would help me get my life together. Then I actually started reading the daily activities.

During the first 100 pages I had been okay with being described as a “visual thinker” -- of course, I have an art degree, right? The activities in the second half of the book are all visualization activities. Creating a crystal-clear mental picture, the authors insist, is the key to harnessing the strengths of the AD/HD brain.

The truth and trouble with that is, holding a detailed image in my mind's eye is like trying to grip the edge of a cliff with my fingertips. It's why I fell in love with photography and battled with drawing classes in college.

When I try to visualize a scene in my mind, even if it is my desk at work, a place I see every day, I can't force the image all the way to the edge of the frame: it dissolves into white around the edges, what little remains in the center losing detail in bits and pieces as if I am trying to remember a dream.

What does come through crystal-clear is sound. As I'm “visualizing” a series of steps in a task at the office, eventually I lose the image completely. It falls away to reveal a complex world of sound: my purse hitting the bottom of the file drawer, the door latching as I leave, my footfalls as they go from hallway to stairs to hallway to sidewalk. Sounds, it seems, can be created in my mind with perfection every time.

When I think, I think in words, spoken by a voice in my mind. I talk to myself when no one is around. If I don't understand a text I am reading, I read through it aloud. There is always music running through my head. A great song will literally tickle my ears and give me chills, a sensation a piece of visual art could never fully evoke.

So what does this mean for me? In grade school I was frightened when I was categorized as a “visual learner” because I was hell-bent on becoming a famous musician. Perhaps I was labeled so because I typically need to see a concept written or drawn out to understand it: I cannot pull words together from the air as easily as I can read them. But all the same, I have to wonder why music always came so readily to me while I struggled to keep up with my peers in drawing and painting.

With AD/HD and visual thinking being almost synonymous, I find myself in the minority once again, unsure how to overcome my difficulties. Maybe it is my fate. My Meyers-Briggs is an INFJ: we account for less than two percent of the population. I suffer from AD/HD but the visualization strategies that help most people are powerless on me. I have a visual art degree but I don't think in pictures.

That is, unless I am looking through a lens. Then I see pictures all around me.