Personal essays
Not everything we create is worth showing to others
The studio
When I was in LA, my brother and sister-in-law took me along to visit with a photographer whose work they admired.
His work was stunning. You’d find yourself captivated - lost in thought - almost meditating as you looked at each one.
He’d thoughtfully answer questions about the scenes and what he was doing and what he was thinking.
Often there was a person in the scene but the scene wasn’t about that person. It’s hard to describe because the person often changed the way you saw the scene around them.
He’d gone to a location that interested him and waited. He waited for the light to hit it a certain way or for a person and their story to enter the scene.
As always, what made each image great were the thousands of pictures he hadn’t taken, the hundreds he hadn’t printed, and the decisions he made when editing and printing.
The wait
Kim and I got married in 1993. There were digital cameras then but most of us were still shooting on film.
We took two cameras with us on our honeymoon. One was loaded with color film and the other with black and white.
Isn’t that something.
In those days you had to decide ahead of time whether you were taking color or black and white.
Oh, also, if you wanted this picture to be color then all of the pictures you took on this roll of film (24 or 36) were also in color.
If that surprises you, you’re never going to believe this. You would take a picture and have no idea if it was any good or not for quite a while.
You had to wait until you’d used up all of the film in the camera and left it somewhere to be developed.
In those days, people would come back from vacation with a couple of pictures left on their roll and take more pictures to use up the film so they could get it developed.
Distance
The photographer I went to visit takes advantage of all of the new tools while inserting time in the process.
It’s still as long or longer between the time that he takes the pictures and when we see the pictures.
He gets immediate feedback on what he’s shot and decides to make adjustments or keep shooting and so he is able to capture what he thinks he wants.
And then he puts them away and doesn’t look at them.
I do this when writing my books. Suppose I write a sentence like this:
“It’s been a long since I wrote these words.”
I meant to write “It’s been a long time…”. If I look at that sentence too soon, I will subconsciously insert the word “time” in my head while reading it back. The word still won’t be on the page and the reader will be puzzled (“one star - he only writes down some of the words”).
If I let it sit for a while, then when I come back to that sentence I’m more likely to see the missing word and fix it.
That’s what the photographer does.
The in between
The photographer creates the picture and edits the picture.
He knows that these are activities that must be separated by time - almost performed by two sides of himself.
After creating, he lets the pictures sit.
And then he goes back and looks at them with fresh eyes.
When he finds one that speaks to him, he stops and looks at it and makes decisions about how to print it.
He has a huge printer just for this purpose.
Once he’s printed it he studies it some more. How it looks on a screen and how it looks on paper can be different.
Adjustments - adjustments - adjustments.
I loved the afternoon we spent in his studio.
I’ll never be able to take the pictures that he takes. I don’t have the eye.
But we all can take way more pictures than we think we need, glance at them and make adjustments.
We can come back to them much later and save some and delete others.
We can decide which ones to edit and what to apply.
We can and should curate more of our lives.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 307. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe