Lead with the Idea

I think something every photographer struggles with is this: My pictures look like everyone else's (or like that person's). I've talked about it, albeit in the distant past. At that time, I made the remark that while all pictures have been, in some sense, already taken, not every picture has been placed next to every other picture.

This leads me down two separate paths. The first is that it is in fact not necessary that your pictures look like someone else's. Sally Mann makes pictures that look different, because she makes aesthetic choices that would strike virtually all other photographers as completely insane. Many of her pictures look like a horrible mistake, or just rotten judgement. It is only when you assemble this battalion of catastrophe that it begins to fall together into something.

The second path is that it doesn't matter if your pictures look kind of like someone else's, but there is an If here. And it's a pretty big one.

Before I get to that, I will update on my P52 project: Languishing. I have discovered, again, that I am unfit to work in this way. By starting from pictures, and searching for the idea, I got only kind of bland ideas that I had no particular will to pursue. The best ideas were watered down versions of ideas I am already pursuing in other ways. For me, at any rate, walking around with the camera and looking for something to make of the pictures simply does not work. Or at any rate it does not work as well as starting from something I feel some real passion for.

Sally Mann, again. The work I saw in DC, "A Thousand Crossings" is in some sense a remix of work she already did, for a variety of reasons, with a variety of ideas. What I perceive as the core of the success here, though, is that all those various ideas sprang from a common place, Mann's love for and relationship with The South. There was, underneath Immediate Family, underneath Proud Flesh, underneath Battlefields, an abiding love and a complex set of emotions toward The South, and it is this that she extracted from the earlier work. Notice that Still Time, At Twelve and much of the more macabre death-related material does not appear (for example, there are probably other swatches of her oeuvre missing as well). That work did not share that common underlying theme.

So, the work was not particularly made with a conscious connection to the idea that eventually came to be the core of the thing I saw. But that passion was there, tucked away, supporting.

I think that really good work often (always?) comes from such wellsprings. I think, in the end, the best work is driven by some underlying passion, something that the artist deeply believes, that the artist is fascinated or obsessed with. The artist may or may not be conscious of it.

This is the big If referred to above.

If your pictures look like everyone else's, don't worry about it. Worry about whether there's any fire in your own belly. If you're just walking around taking pictures that are vaguely interesting, well, so be it. Perhaps you're honing some skills.

If you're just walking around taking pictures which you find yourself weirdly in love with, well, maybe there's some passion. Don't force it, but it might be worthwhile gently teasing it out into the open so you know where you're going. Or maybe you'll archive the pictures and find them again in a decade or two and it will burst upon you like a thunderstorm what you were actually doing.

A depressingly common case among artists seems to be walking around taking pictures that support some thesis the artist doesn't much care about, but which is in vogue. This work isn't very strong either, but it looks strong to the Art Community because it supports a chic thesis.

If you're driven by passion already, great. You're ahead of the game.

No matter how you slice it, I think that if there is a passion, a love, an obsession somewhere inside you as you're making your pictures, it simply doesn't matter if they look like someone else's, or like nobody else's. It doesn't matter if they're sharp or blurry or dark or botched. As long as they're the right thing, as long as they feed that fire, your work has a shot at coming together into something distinct and valuable.