Creative artists (writers, photographers, painters, filmmakers, musicians, etc) should always be given the freedom to express their own ideas in whichever way they wish because there should not be any restriction on what they do. A creative artist expresses their ideas in their piece of work whether it’s a song, painting, picture, video, etc. Creativity forms through the freedom of artists exploring and expressing their ideas without the fear of it being put out there and getting restricted. If they get restricted from this freedom, it would not be creative at all and it would not be authentic since that freedom is being stripped away from them and becoming limited leaving them with no authority over their work.
In the film Nightcrawler by Dan Gilroy we get a character named Louis Bloom who seeks for any job in order to make some money. He ends up stumbling on the career as a cameraman, with the equipment of camcorder and police scanner, and begins getting involved in the activity of going across the city in search of shocking and gruesome crimes. With these recordings, he brings them over to a news station and his work ends up being shown on the news. This is an example of a creative artist who expresses his own ideas in whatever way he wants. Now the way he expresses his idea may not be ideal, like getting in the victim’s face or breaking into the house to get better footage, but it is his own way of expressing what he wants to show. The news director, Rene Russo, even told Louis Bloom himself “you have a good eye” (Gilroy, 2014, 19:59) so if he was not to be able to get told this, he would have never known what this opportunity could have bought if he was limited to what he could and could not do. Due to Bloom’s freedom, we are able to receive his perspective on how he sees and portrays these crimes which is what makes it personal and creative. We get to see it from his own point of view and he gets to express that with everyone else around him.
A Chinese contemporary artist named Ai Weiwei is known for his political analysis and advocacy for human rights concerns. In a lot of his photography, he has a way of expressing how he feels in his photo with the use of his middle finger. He shows his middle finger in a lot of his photographs and it is his way to show how he feels about the setting behind his finger. It kind of puts into perspective of why he is flipping off these certain things and what it really means. A lot of Ai Weiwei’s photographs are based on perspective, his blurry middle finger and a clear view of the setting behind the middle finger. The pictures speak very loudly and give him that power of flipping off these places. A lot of people have controversy about keeping it appropriate and respectful when it comes to any form of art, especially photographs, keeping it limited of what they can or can not do. If he was not to have that freedom of expressing himself in whatever way he wants, it would not be authentic and personal. His middle finger speaks for him and it tells the viewers how he feels about the certain setting in the background without actually saying a thing. If we strip these from artists and put a limit on what they can not express, it would make no sense calling it creative because it would in fact not be creative.