Inspiration vs Creativity.
- Jonás Álvarez
- Dec 9
- 6 min read
Notes on a Failed Photograph.
The difference between inspiration and creativity is often presented as if they were two clean, almost pedagogical moments: first the spark, then the work. But when I try to think about that distinction from the concrete experience of photographing, the boundaries become far less clear.
I think, for example, of that trip to eastern Iceland in early March. In continental Europe there was already talk of spring, but on the island the calendar follows a different logic. In the south, the snow retreated timidly from the valleys; in the east, however, the landscape remained fixed in an almost absolute winter: untouched snow, minus fourteen, minus sixteen degrees, the car turned into a nocturnal shelter. There was no epic suffering. I slept well, because I was prepared. The discomfort was not in the body but somewhere else, in that diffuse mental state in which one keeps shooting without entirely knowing why.
During the trip I made hundreds of photographs and as I usually do, once home I stored them on the computer and let them disappear from memory. I need that forgetting as part of my practice: a dead time in which the images cool down, become less mine, less attached to the excitement of the moment. Nine months later, when I finally opened that folder, the photographs were no longer a fresh memory but something closer to a strange archive.
Among them, I found a series of mountain images, a winter landscape like any other, at least at first glance. I looked at them for a long time, trying to reconstruct the original gesture: what exactly did I see when I pressed the shutter? What urgency made me lift the camera? I could not remember. And to be honest, they were not great photographs. They are not strong enough to become the body of a project; they do not aspire to more than what they are. But precisely because of that, they become useful in another way: they turn into an excuse to think, a starting point for writing, for dismantling certain ideas we take for granted. Sometimes the image cannot sustain a work, but it can open a conversation.
What remained, in any case, was a snowy surface, a mountain, a sky. Nothing particularly singular, nothing that justified its existence on its own. I began to edit them through the usual routine (white balance, contrast, small adjustments). No plan, no clear intention of doing anything with them. Until, almost by accident, I rotated the image several times, placing the sky at the bottom and the mountain at the top. That minimal gesture, a 90 degree turn, produced a fracture in how the image was read. The mountain began to behave like something else. Suddenly I associated it with those overhead drone images in which the foam of receding waves traces shapes on the shore. The snow became a marine texture, the shadows a kind of beach.
This visual slip is not a simple formal coincidence. It reveals something uncomfortable: the ease with which our gaze absorbs any landscape into a repertoire of already known, already circulated, already consumed forms. Eastern Iceland, with its snowy mountains, becomes legible as a drone view of a coastline because our imagination is largely shaped by contemporary visual cliches.
Here the distinction between inspiration and creativity begins to tighten.
One could say that inspiration was present back then, nine months earlier, when I pointed the camera at the mountain without fully knowing why. An impulsive, almost anarchic gesture, responding to something that had not yet reached the level of articulated thought. Creativity, by contrast, would appear later, in front of the computer, when my mind, now free from the excitement of the journey, begins to fabricate meaning, to order, to reorganize, to test rotations.
But perhaps that definition is too neat. If we accept that inspiration is that initial impulse, is it not already traversed by a prior archive of images, by genre conventions, by the recent history of landscape photography, by the omnipresence of the drone and the overhead view in neoliberal visual culture? Is it not, in a way, an unconscious obedience to what is supposed to be photogenic?
And if creativity consists of giving meaning to the image afterwards, what kind of meaning is that? Is it the arrangement of elements to produce a formally interesting result? Or is it also a way of rewriting the photograph in order to pull it, even slightly, away from the visual orthodoxies that precede it?
Inspiration is often romanticized as something pure, almost mystical, a gift, an unexpected visitation. But in practice, it resembles more a conditioned reflex shaped by everything we have seen, consumed, and repeated. When I made that photograph in eastern Iceland, I was not working from a void but from a body saturated with previous images, many of them produced under tourist, extractive, spectacularization logics. The camera, even in the hands of someone who wants to use it critically, never arrives innocent at the scene.
Creativity, then, is not simply being original or having a good idea. In this case, it manifests as the need to interrogate the image itself: to force it through a process of disorientation. Rotating the photograph until it no longer reads immediately as an Icelandic mountain is a small gesture, but it points to something larger: the possibility that an image resists its expected destiny, that it refuses to merely illustrate a location, a climate, a travel experience.
One could say that inspiration is centrifugal (it shoots outward, accelerates the accumulation of archives, trusts the impulse). Creativity would be centripetal (it returns to the images, slows them down, subjects them to suspicion, reorganizes them not to beautify but to make them think).
The problem is that we live in an ecosystem in which inspiration is more profitable than creativity. The economy of images favors constant flow, incessant production, content as raw material for platforms and algorithms. There, anarchic inspiration is celebrated, but only insofar as it translates into images that are easily consumable, recognizable, quickly classifiable. Drone coastlines, snowy mountains, the solitary car in the middle of the road, all of them fit smoothly into the dominant visual grammar.
Creativity, understood as a slow and critical engagement with images, is far less functional to that system. It demands time, distance, the possibility that a photograph loses its first identity (landscape, travel memory, proof of extreme cold) in order to become something else, a space of ambiguity, an interruption in the continuity of the visible.
Perhaps the question is not only what is the difference between inspiration and creativity, but what kind of relationship we want to establish between them in a context where the image is also a device of power. If we let inspiration operate alone, we risk reproducing, almost without noticing, the ways of seeing that are handed to us: landscape as postcard, snow as backdrop, travel as consumption.
If, instead, we reclaim creativity as a form of thought (not merely an aesthetic skill), then the acts of editing, rotating, cropping, or even discarding an image become a political exercise: deciding which images are worth continuing to produce, which ways of seeing we want to perpetuate, and which ones we prefer to trouble.
The seemingly trivial scene of a snowy mountain that suddenly resembles a beach seen from above opens a small fissure. It reminds us that any photograph can become something else, that its meaning is not fixed in the moment of exposure. Between the impulsive click and the late revision lies an interval in which the image stops being memory and is not yet a stable interpretation. It is there that inspiration and creativity blur into each other, argue, and correct one another.
Maybe the task is not to choose one over the other, but to learn to inhabit that interval, to accept that photography is not just a record of what was, but a way of thinking with what we still do not fully know how to name. And to assume that if there is anything truly fertile in this process, it is not the certainty of having found the correct meaning, but the willingness to keep looking at the same image again and again as if it were never fully resolved.
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