P#21 Q7A: An Exercise in Learning to See Creatively

Words on Paper

Bryan Peterson: There's an exercise I want your listeners to consider doing if they're interested in learning to see creatively. First, assign yourself a list of words. It doesn't have to be large. Take the word "indifference," take the word "ambition", take another word "safety" or "caution," or "connection," "apathy."

Now, visually go out and find something that would interpret that word so when a person looks at that photograph, right away they think, "Oh, that leaf on that branch looks so apathetic," or, "My, that's an ambitious looking twig," or, "Golly sakes, if I didn't know better, I'd say that that dew drop looked indifferent to all the other ones."

In other words, you're looking to photograph emotions. That's the challenge we give in one of the classes at the school, the Art of Seeing. We throw a little book at them and say, "This is your list of words," of which I think they're about 30 in that lesson.

Here's the trick -- you go out and shoot whatever you want, but do not include people or people parts. It has to be anything not related to people, so there can't be a single person or people part showing up in the photograph. That extends the challenge to an amazing difficulty and is really helpful for people who are learning to see creatively.

Yet it's amazing what photographs can do, and as many students reported that lesson alone is often what wakes up the sleeping giant that lies within most of us -- the creative juices that are just sitting there idle that needs something to wake them up. That assignment, almost without fail, does just that.

Audri Lanford: I can certainly see why. That is phenomenal. It sounds like so much fun.

Bryan Peterson: It is fun, especially when you think that, "I did this well and I can't wait to upload the pictures and show the rest of my fellow students." You may be me on the opposite and say, "I'm drawing a blank here." There's this tremendous anticipation that everybody feels when all this stuff gets uploaded, because right away they want to go, "What'd they do and how'd they do it? What'd they use?"

It's a great opportunity to just see how far you can push the idea. I've told a couple of students this over the years. If all they did was take that word list and do nothing but shoot that word list for the rest of their lives, they would make an incredible amount of money in the world of stock.

In Closing

If you want to release your inner creative beast, you need the key to the cage that holds it. According to Bryan Peterson, this exercise will have you learning to see creatively immediately.