David Killingback | Photographer

…1994 when I had my revelation, my epiphany.

It was circa 1am in a tiny club in the city of Bath (south-west England, UK) called The Hub. Carl Craig was DJ’ing, playing classic funky Detroit techno tunes. A couple of hundred people were dancing like the possessed.

It was during Ron Trent’s seminal work Altered States that something happened, I wasn’t willing it to happen, or even barely aware that it could happen, but despite myself, it did. With sweat in my eyes and irresistible waves of joyous throbbing sub-bass rumbles shaking my body I realised for the first time that I wasn’t listening just to music, no, I was listening and dancing and living and breathing to sex in the form of music. “Huh?”, I hear you say. Let me explain. It’s quite simple. During sex the psychological barriers between two people collapse, and in some essential sense they become one. That night in April 1994 it was as though the psychological barriers which normally separate us came down and in some essential sense we all became one. It was one of the most intensely creative experiences I’ve ever had. That’s one of the things that art can do.

Once you’ve had an intense experience or learned something really important, you cannot unlearn it, you can never go back and occupy the same state as before the experience. And the priorities in your life change too. For me, that meant I learned to admit to myself and accept that I’m a creative and will never be able to do a standard full-time 9-5. Creativity became my priority and the thing I needed to do in order to feel like I’m fulfilling my reason for being on this planet - first in music, later through photography, in the future via film-making. (You can also put 4 years of creative study, thinking and writing in the areas of philosophy, theology, literature and the arts at uni in there.)

I love this extract from a recent interview with Carl Craig, this is a man who has had his priorities in life shaped by his love for what he does:

“I’m also intrigued as to why to this day he [Carl Craig] still resides in Detroit, a city reported so negatively for its high crime rates and derelict landscape, after all these years. “It’s cheap.” Eh? “I can have a great lifestyle here. I can live as an artist and do what I want to do because it’s just so much cheaper.” OK, but… what about the music scene in the city? “Well, we don’t really have that many clubs or anything. People keep to themselves, but it’s a city full of artists doing their own thing, expressing their own individuality, and I like that.””

That’s the kind of commitment to ones art which makes it such a potent, powerful and subtle force capable of bringing people together in intensely unique and life-changing ways.

I love that last line: “…it’s a city full of artists doing their own thing, expressing their own individuality, and I like that.”

I’ve never experienced that. I think I need to.

(Source: spoonfed.co.uk)

I make a conscious effort to try and hang-out with as many creative types as I can: writers, musicians, web nerds, interior designers, photographers, etc. And I love it, I always come away having learned new stuff and with the seeds of new ideas reverberating in my mind. But something I hear us creative types saying a lot is something along the lines of “If only I had such and such I would be able to do blah de blah.” This is a myth. Being a creative means you have to create the “blah de blah” before you get the “such and such”. A £4,000 camera, £1,800 lenses and unlimited travel may just be the most creatively stifling thing that can happen to a developing photographer. Why? Because the assumption is that photographic creativity is impossible without those tools (and that’s all they are) and having those tools just means it will take longer to understand that it’s what is 6 inches behind the camera which matters. CREATIVITY COMES FROM YOU, NOT A PIECE OF EQUIPMENT.

The great Italian film director Dino De Laurentiis (RIP) said it like this:

They [the media] wrote that certain directors and screenwriters were interested in Neorealism, but it’s not true. The Italian movie industry was so poor that there was no money to shoot in the studios, to build sets, to travel. That’s why everything was shot on the street.

The music producer, singer, sculptor, multi-media artist, etc, Brian Eno states that too many options kill creativity, so the first thing to do when you go into a recording studio is limit your options by deciding what you are NOT going to do. Elsewhere he suggests that if you want to get original results you should work quickly and cheaply.

So if you can’t afford a D3x, 1Ds mkIII, 1000fps Red system or Mac Pro be happy, pick up a old Nikon F90x / Mamiya RB67 / Pentax 67, and get out into the world and do your thing and keep doing it until you get to where you want to be.