Author: James Vornov

Yesterday I visited the Metropolitain Museum of Art in NYC to see the Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe just to soak in this important period of the arts in the US. There was a small associated gallery with some of Stieglitz’ photography collection. The photographs brought to mind once again how much photography was competing with painting until technical advances in film and printing gave photography the kind of technical image perfection that we now think of “photographic”. I’ve always yearned for the painterly results that the early techniques porduced. Our technical abilities have now advanced to the point that Flickr has thousands of well composed, perfectly exposed images that were hard to achieve in the predigital era.

There was another small photography gallery at the Met which was more inspiring to me, After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection. The images were all ones that addressed culture and political power. What struck me was the choice of a test wall installation as the closer for the gallery. I’d never seen his work before, but I believe he is on to something in presenting mulitple images in multiple sizes of multiple subjects that relate to each others in a way that a single image cannot.

I’ve begun printing images again and have been looking at how images relate when prints are placed in relation to each other. So far, it suggests why these images get created and how they are connected.

Last night’s dinner: Duck Risotto with Duck Skin Gribenes. In the US, fried skins are usually called Cracklings. Gribenes is the Yiddish term of art.

On Chanukah, it’s traditional to eat fried foods like potato latkes. It’s just a culinary not to the miracle of the oil that’s celebrated.

Reading Mark Bernstein’s discussion of the future of books reminded me of my research methods in my academic days and a shocking recent discovery about the future of a library.

I never learned the classic index card source method. I would grab a new legal pad and scribble some information at the top of a page to link the notes to some source, generally a book. I’d then just write and write and write on the page, flipping to a fresh page as needed. It was a crazy mix of my my own thoughts and information directly from the source. The raw material. Since I never had the patience to actually copy quotes or information, I only wrote enough to recapture and document the dissuasion going on between the source and myself in that notes page.

I remember now that I’d often read a book cover to cover with excitement and then take a second, leisurely stroll through it to have that conversation with the author. Other times it was a page flipping attack on a book to see whether a particular subject was to be found in its pages. Researching obscure topics lead to a lot of attacks on a lot of books. Often I’d go from one end of the shelf of the library to the other, flipping systematically through every plausible source.

When it was time to write, I’d outline a section and decide what sources were relevant. Then I’d have the sources physically piled up in front of me, my notes to my left and a new pad for writing on the right. The process was to write, reference material by pulling the source and my notes and write some more. Of course revisions included pulling all of the physical sources together again.

This method was perfectly suited both to my poor memory, distractibility and the library environment. I didn’t work in my dorm room or, later, my office. The library was where I read, researched and wrote. As a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, I loved setting aside the time to begin the preparation of a manuscript or grant so that I could spend those hours lost in the stacks of Welch Medical Library.

Once out of college and focused on neuroscience, the system worked just as well as long as the Xerox machines were working. I probably spent more time dragging bound journals down to the basement and flipping pages to copy than I did reading or writing. I developed a commitment to never cite research that I hadn’t read and, generally, didn’t have a physical copy of to refer to. In fact, hidden in a couple of the book chapters I wrote are indirect references to sources, such “Jones (1936) as summarized in Smith (1994)”" when I couldn’t get a copy of Jones to read directly or it was written in another language. Sadly, as abstract services became electronic, it became a very, very common practice for papers to cite research that the author had clearly never read critically based solely on the research as inaccurately described in the paper’s abstract.

Imagine my surprise when I learned last month that Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins was going to close the doors of its historic building. Of course library services were not going away, it was decided that a better use of resources would be to enhance electronic services and campus delivery of books rather than keep a building open for the 106 visitors a day who circulated around the stacks of journals which were almost all available on line anyway.

Checking the Welch Medical Library website today, I see that the plan has been scuttled and instead there will be a larger discussion about the library. Despite such rearguard actions, the future of the library is clear. Libraries will be a service, not a place.

Mark closed his discussion about the future of books this way, “If our books are not as good as they can be, we can make them better. If we know how to make them better, and we want to make them better, why would we not?”

I submit that the books (and journal articles) are only one part of this transition. The real change is in the environment of these books, migrating from physical form to distributed digital information. It’s chaotic now, with way too many devices and contexts for retrieving and collecting information. I find myself redeveloping my stack of of sources, my legal pads of notes and my writing pad over and over again every six months, but where the sources are in a dozen forms that partially overlap, notes in half a dozen systems (text files, Findings, Tinderbox), and writing in yet another half dozen programs.

We call it “workflow”, but that’s a symptom of the world in transition. If we’re smart, we’ll be choosing and developing tools that together create a more powerful version of the library carrel. And valuing scholarship, not just the ability to weave a few sources into an entertaining yarn.

Reclining
Florence, Italy

I was inspired by Zack Arias to look back on my photographic output of the last few years and try to put together a portfolio, perhaps as prints. I’ve been working on editing and rating photos lately to put together some photo books to give as gifts. That turns out to be a real motivator for me to bring photography more into my life.

I thought that I might cut the process short by just finding the photos in my aperture library that were tagged by FlickrExport as being uploaded. Flickr tells me that since I started uploading in late 2005, I’ve posted 628 images. Using the Archive Thumbnail View I could survey my body of work on screen quickly and see the number of images for each year. It looks like this:

So in 2008, my Flickr posting peaked at about an image every other day. I was surprised the pattern. Based on a review of image counts within Aperture, it looks like it has to do both with decreased numbers of shots taken and processed plus a waning of intrest in Flickr’s social side. A few years ago, I was active in several groups and anticipated the views and feedback.

I’m pretty confident that I can use the Flickr tags through 2008. But I’ll need to do a broader reivew for the last few years to identify promising images and process them.

“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” – Garry Winogrand

Perfect Practice

Creative pursuit, whether art or science, is a method for improving the brain. If “Deciding Better” means developing more accurate models of reality to guide choices, then the getting better must involve more than just acquisition and reflection.

The best practice for an activity is the activity itself. You don’t expect to become a better tennis player by playing the tuba. You become better at tennis either by practicing the game or breaking the skills and capacities of the game into components and improving each. There’s then practice to put the components back together into an improved tennis game.

Simply playing the game over and over will get you only so far. At some point there’s more to be gained by breaking down the activity into component parts and spending focused time on each one. Jogging is nothing like tennis, but ithelps a tennis player by building endurance for long games. Jogging avoids the risk of injury from fatigue that would come from playing long sessions of the game over and over.

The Practice of Art

If you’re a photographer, you have probably heard the advice that you should always carry a camera. Usually the reason given is that without a camera, you can’t do what a photographer does, thus you can’t be a photographer. I’ve heard similar directives to always carry a pen and a notebook in order to be a writer.

The advice is fair enough. But I believe it’s backwards. Rather than bringing a camera in order to be a photographer, you first must to decide to be a photographer and therefore need a camera. Always going out with a camera easily becomes just a habit. After all, I have nice cell phone camera capable of taking higher quality images than my first DSLR of a decade ago. I pull up the photo roll on the phone and mostly see images of food I’ve prepared or been served in restaurants plus snapshots of friends and family. I don’t see photographs

I take out my notebook and create hastily scribbled thoughts and half formed concepts. That’s not the art of writing and it’s not even practicing.

I wasn’t practicing to be a photographer when I captured images of my bread last week. I wasn’t practicing to be a writer when I wrote, “Scientists ask why. Science is a long term project to understand a problem or phenomenon.” in my notebook last week. I was cooking, eating, socializing and reflecting. Capturing ideas is not practicing. I was more the tennis player with a tuba.

The Nature of Practice

What did Winogrand mean when he said that he took photographs in order to find out what something will look like photographed?

I believe he was making the simple point that his intention was to be a photographer and learn what reality looked like reduced to a photographic print. And he learned through his career. Since he shared the images with us, we can look at them and also learn what the world looks like in a photograph. We too can learn how the world that Gary Winogrand saw looks in a photograph by looking at his work.

If he meant that he was after some simple transformation of reality into photograph, his photos would be of little interest to anyone, to Winogrand himself or to me. I believe that he meant to say that he took photographs to help him perceive the world in a way he couldn’t just by looking. Image capture is nothing more than framing and isolating a particular angle of view. You and I know there are tons of technical details, but they are all secondary to where you stand and where you point the camera. The first step is seeing and the second step is finding out what the world looks like in a photograph.

Can you learn to see without taking photographs or creating some kind of record, visual or written? Of course you can, but the feedback of creating is an enormous aid to learning. Without a camera the image never exists independently to see if you were right. It’s too easy to fool yourself into thinking you have the clear insight without the evidence of the art.

To learn to see as a photographer requires a decision to practice seeing. You have to put on the tennis shoes, choose the tennis racket and get to the court. It’s deciding to decide to learn what the world looks like in a photograph.

Perfect Practice

Vincent Versace, the photographer and teacher quoted Vince Lombardi in his Welcome to Oz : “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. You first have to practice at practicing.”"

We’ve learned from cognitive neuroscience that we can only do one thing at a time with our brains. Intention and planning rule the sensory and motor systems and squeezes everything else out. I recognize this as choosing to be present and active in the task. I’m not going to be photographing or writing while driving to the mall or surfing the web. Seeing with intention is a focused brain activity. I must choose to look..

More than this, to be a photographer, you have to choose to see what things might look like in a photograph. In addition to choosing to see, you have to choose the camera and you have to choose what to see. The two go together. If I choose to see African wildlife since I did after all book a safari and travel to Kenya, then I’ll need some quality telephoto lenses. If I choose to see what the streets of Florence look like on a rainy day, then a light and flexible camera is going to be my choice.

Searching for Questions

Occasionally, very rarely, I know what I’m after. I’m not on assignment for Geographic. I have no gallery looking for my characteristic work to place with clients. I’m just practicing to learn what things look like in photographs. I’m no different from Winogrand in the aim of photographing.

The tool can dictate the subject of the lesson. I have too many cameras. My excuse to my wife? “They do different things.” If I go out to see what things look like with my DSLR, tripod and macro lens, I’m going to see small things. And I’ll find out what small things look like in a photograph. If I drive downtown with my compact mirrorless camera that has the flip up, waist level screen and put a vintage Leica lens on it, I’m out to see what’s interesting at a human scale in a city. Like a runner who competes in both long and short distance events, I’m limiting myself by not focusing on seeing in a particular way. I respond to contexts, seeing where I am rather than going where I can see.

Artists and scientists like to set themselves problems to aid with this goal of focused learning. You should take Winogrand’s approach and find out what a thing looks like photographed. Keep in mind that it’s easier to get going when the question is more specific than “What does the world look like when photographed?” If you try to learn about a particular thing: a mountain, people in the city, or the suburban landscape, then the direction is clear and the components that need work become more obvious.

Wall Painting, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Florence, Italy

I think of these images as “recompositions”. I love the color and form that the graffiti artist has left. I come along and capture it in context, bringing the environment itself into a relationship to the graffitti.

I trust my instincts when it comes to these captures. The wall is visually interesting so it’s worth recomposing into an image.

Not Through Here, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

In late October when I was in Italy on business, I brought the Nikon D7000 and Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 zoom. I hadn’t brought the Nikon on a trip in some time. My travel kit was the Sigma D1 for a while and the Sony NEX-5 most recently. Both have large sensors but are small mirorless cameras. The LCD screen on the back of Sony was scratched so I took the Nikon.

Interestingly, I captured more images that were probably better overall than other recent trips. It’s not that I think quality is really different across these cameras. In fact the NEX-5 and D7000 have more or less the same sensor.

I think its the seeing. Walking the streets of Florence with a larger, highly controllable DSLR just made me see more. I’m in the same place with a camera or without a camera. But with the camera in hand, my tool brings the focus.

If you’re a photographer, go out with a camera not so that you can capture images. No, an iPhone is now good enough to capture images to record life. Carry the tool to decide to see and capture images. If you’re a writer, go out with a pen and notebook. Don’t carry the tool in case you have an idea, go out with the goal of getting an idea.

I was a curious and excitable child, quiet but intense. I’m still that little kid; I hear something cool and burst with energy to tell someone about it. Its a good thing that I have these outlets on the Internet to report back on what I’ve learned. Maybe you’re reading this looking for similar discoveries.

As much as I see, I imagine that there must be even more. What I’m looking for may or may not exist. I have no real idea of the question. I have vague thoughts and conceptions that I can just imagine but can’t express.

All my life I’ve marveled at how the brain provides us with this rich internal experience. How do we become these infinitely varied and unique individuals? Our brains all look the same and work the same, but each of us is a complete universe looking out from behind a pair of eyes. I’ve learned from great thinkers like William James and John Searles. Years have been spent in concentrated and focused pursuit of answers. I’m an amateur. I know they learned things I need to know. Some of what I’ve read and understood, I agree with. Some common mistakes arise again and again.

When I read, I’m in dialog. I imagine I have something important to add to the conversation. The problem is that my thoughts are not yet fully formed. I see connections and possibilities that are easily dismissed. Uncertainty, free will and cognitive neuroscience combine in a stew, flavoring each other but not yet agreeing to be one.

Annie Dillard asked “Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”

I don’t write to curate my personal “brand”. I have a really good job at a great company. It pays me well to do things that I continue to be enthusiastic about even decades into my career as a Neurologist and drug developer. I almost never write about such things here. I’ve tried a few times, but it feels like work. I already know what I think and crafting the writing is not rewarding. If anything I confuse the world by having an online presence focused not on science but on art.

I do write at work to support and build the business. I take notes at meetings to assimilate and synthesize what I’ve heard. My scholarly output has a few highlights over the years: the vulnerability of neurons to injury demonstrated in the dish, the biological relevance of NAAG and GCP II, the development of a water soluble prodrug of propofol. I’ve done a lot of different things professionally and I don’t expect that I’m done yet.

The business writing is public. Those words have been set out to perform a task for me to talk to my collegues or my company’s customers. Drug development is an expensive, complicated undertaking and I contribute from my fund of knowledge or experience. Generally once I’ve organized my thoughts, the process of structuring prose and constructing arguments is straightfoward. Prose can be polished and tightened, but all to the end of expression and communication.

All art is secret. It springs from personal need and private thought. Eventually I put this grasping into physical form in words or image as search for what I believe I must know but can’t yet express.

Once I think I’ve crystalized that elusive idea, the writing is a test. In order to prove that I’ve really assembled the notion, the only way I can be sure that it’s real is to write it down and get it clear. Certainly if I find the words wandering and fighting me, I have to concede that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

A long time ago, I came up with the revision strategy of reading a confused paragraph and saying to myself, “What am I trying to say here?” Sometime’s I’ll get up, walk around and speak it out, the act of forming the words driving the idea into reality. If I can’t say it, I haven’t created the thought yet.

It may turn out that I have nothing to say. That unformed idea may be just confusion made of crossed wires and misperception. I may be lacking the insight to be seeing this old world in a new way. My insight may be cliched or simply obvious.

Worst is when my words fail to communicate the ideas. If I’m misunderstood or misinterpreted, I’ve failed. I have to allow that you may see the world differently. You’ll bring your own experiences and mental models. Art needs ambiguity to allow others to enter where the creator has been. When I experience art, I want to feel like the artist is speaking to me and inviting me to join.

All art is public and its ultimate test is truth. Art needs to work in the world. Why does that excited kid that puts his art into the world? To test its truth. I want to know whether I’m making sense. If my writing is dismissed, ignored or argued with, then I’ll have to conclude that it doesn’t contain enough truth because it doesn’t work for anybody else. You may not read what I meant to say, but if it says what you want then I’ve succeeded.

These worlds go out to you as a validation. These ideas on deciding seem to help me understand myself and my relationship to the world. But I’ll be more sure that I’ve gotten it right if you read this and at least nod or smile with me. I’ll feel even better if you stop reading here and start putting your own ideas down so that I can share your astonishment with the world, with yourself, with me.

Establishing the Zone, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Glen, New Hampshire

I know that trees are curved surfaces, but I’m somehow surprised every time I register the fall of light across that dimension.

I start the same sentence over and over again. I struggle to get my ideas to behave on the page. I discover that what I thought was clear in my mind is complete nonsense when turned into words.

Yesterday I started reading some well reasoned arguments in a year old document at work. It was simple and clear. I started thinking that I really ought to find out who wrote it so I could delegate some work to them. I still can’t be sure that the words are mine. I don’t remember writing them, but it sounds like me. The voice is assured and more than a little pedantic. Those words seem to have escaped completely and are living on their own.

Professionally, words are my emmisaries. They string along like little agents spawned from my view of the world. I may get credit for them or I may not. They’re out there doing their work even without my knowledge or permission. I write more clearly now than during my academic career. My writing then was as convoluted as my theorizing.

While the writing produced can be useful to others, I generally no longer need the words I’ve written. I know what I think. It’s the act of writing that is useful to me personally. Simple prose demands clear ideas. Sometimes a thought distilled evaporates completely. More often the residue is true but unoriginal and can go off to do its work.

At this moment I am writing to learn to write. I’ve been reading books and essays on writing to hear what’s said about the process and craft. I’m writing to understand what I’ve been told.

Writing about writing is hard to pull off. An author talking about words on a printed page can’t avoid the self referential nature of writing about writing. The reader checks the writing itself to see whether what is there before them reflects the author’s views. a poorly written book about writing fails by defeating itself. Just as a parent loses authoritiy by screaming at their kid not to scream, a long sentence about writing short sentences is unconvincing even if perfectly lucid and coherent.

Many years ago I read William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. The book is a classic, providing a simple and lucid account of how to write non-fiction simply and lucidly. Zinsser learned his craft as a journalist. I’m sympathetic to the style because most of my writing is for science and business, settings that are journalistic in their goals. My initial training came from journalists. In the late 1990’s, I was writing for The Motley Fool. The Fool had become one of the first big draws at America Online based on the active message boards and well written content that attracted novice investors like me. As they transitioned to the web and professionalized their writing staff, I left the orbit of the Gardner brothers, but the lessons I learned writing for them are with me still.

I’ve now been writing internet content for almost 15 years. The size of my audience has fluctuated as has the volume and quality of my output. For long stretches, I’ve written nothing, turning my attention to photography or life itself. The need to write comes back, asserting itself as it does right now.

I must need to learn something now. I’m reading about writing. I’ll read and write until I’ve had my full. Publishing is now easy and without cost. Instant access to so much material for free elevates the problems of learning to new levels. With so much to read, writing to learn is the way I’ll see it through.

My trips to the public library as a child also provided access to more books than I could read in a lifetime. The university libraries I had access to in college and medical school were even larger collections of content. Researching the scientific literature consumed weeks of my attention at a time during my faculty years.

For the information to be used and not just consumed, some output is required. What do I think? How do I imagine the life on board a British ship during the Napoleonic Wars? What is the role of intracellular calcium in brain damage during and after a stroke? One learns quickly that the information swirling about in the mind evaporates like mist when asked to explain it to some one else. The transfer of understanding from one mind to another is why we write. But it can’t be done, until we learn.

In Writing To Learn, Zinnser tells us that the best path to learning is the writing itself. Assembling, synthesizing and expressing thought in written form is a method of clarifying and codifying knowledge. Extending the arguments of On Writing Well, he places clarity and simplicity of expression as the ultimate goals of writing to lead thought itself to clarity and simplicity. Zinnser being Zinnser, he pulls off the trick of writing about writing once again.

Clarity and simplicity are the goals. Volume is the challenge. There are so many authorities and so many facts. The universe is incomprehensibly huge and our own small world to big to know. What is it about writing that can distill that complex and chaotic experience into something manageable and known?