Frame

“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”

I recently started framing my photographs.

Not the ‘in real life’ wooden frames to hang on a wall, but putting thin white lines around images I use in presentations and conversations about the aesthetics of leadership and transformation.

I’m still unsure what it was all about; a bit of a mystery.

But as I let my mind wander, I bump into a whole list of contradictions and questions threading through our thoughts of organisations and aesthetics.

The idea of ‘artistic practice’ in organisational life runs into trouble quite quickly. For more than a hundred years we have enthusiastically organised around images of machine-like, scientific efficiency and controllable, planned change. More recently, we have started to accept that the world, our whole cosmos even, is both less predictable and more complex that we might have appreciated. And now, new statistics support the latest management mantra that, rather than trying to ‘simplify’ the complexity that apparently afflicts us, the best leaders should work ‘creatively.’

Whatever.

These days, I’m evermore disinterested in management prescriptions and models, along with their over-sharpened, abstract, anodyne images of business. Instead, I’m paying attention to my more embodied, relational experience of the flowing conversations and glorious characters that make up the real, flesh and blood life of our organisations. Rather than chasing the latest two-by-two matrix, I’m looking for the moments that catch my attention, stop me in my tracks, and invite me to consider them as the ‘attractors’ for the way we organise our lives.

But, rather like the apocryphal strategy lesson where a group of blindfolded managers try to describe an elephant by touching different body parts, I know we all experience life differently. We each find our own ways to understand our participation in the world.

The white line around my blossom photograph reminds me of the way I circled the tree, to find the breathless moment where soft light fell before a darkened background and the image appeared before me. Then, standing close enough for the background to slip out of focus, I began to narrow my gaze onto the flower and set my frame.

Joseph Campbell says that we can be held in ‘aesthetic arrest;’ the sensation I notice as I am ‘caught’ by an image as it momentarily emerges from its background. I know that if I searched again for the particular blossom in my photograph, it will have already fallen to the ground and, in framing my image so that the litter-strewn path and the buildings in the background no longer demand attention, I’m setting boundaries and trying to preserve a jewel-like glimpsed moment. The white line around the image reminds me of the discernment and creativity in my process, even if that process itself is something that I would rather not look at too closely.

As we structure problems, decide strategy and define our leadership, we often either relate back to past experience or try to deliberately eschew the past and search for something new. As we choose, our aesthetic frames unconsciously guide us and we see some things while missing others.

In recognising the moments of ‘aesthetic arrest’ that pre-configure the images at the foundation of our perception, we can consciously share our experience; naming and framing together as we choose our futures.

I’ve learned that my own aesthetic frames tend towards melancholy and shadow as much as conventional beauty or prettiness, but I hope that, together, we can let the creativity in our work remain as a fuzzy concept.

It’s more art than science and rewards a little mystery.

Notes:

Joseph Campbell’s lectures on aesthetic arrest were built on James Joyce's exploration of ‘esthetics’ in 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. But don’t be tempted by the e-book version which is, apparently, littered with mistakes….

Framing, in the social context, is a term introduced by Erving Goffman in ‘Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience.’ Goffman used the metaphor of a picture frame to illustrate how we structure our perception to hold together our experience of life (which represented by the picture).

For a more photographic view of ‘framing’ you might enjoy ‘The Practice of Contemplative Photography: Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes’ by Andy Karr and Michael Wood which explores our processes of perception though eye, hand and heart. They note that, “Clear seeing produces clear, fresh images.” When we are able to connect well with our perception, what resonates within us in the original seeing will also resonate in the photograph.’