Fine art photographers should be intentional about how they define creative success. In golf or writing code it’s easier to decide how to mark progress, not so with creative endeavors. But if art is a journey, being able to see how far you’ve come is important.
If you don’t define your work intentionally, you define it by adopting expectations. Expectations come from other people, and if they are not thought out, they likely won’t fit. Like a computer trying to execute code that wasn’t compiled for it, the general ideas might be good, but the particulars will cause a lot of errors if it works at all.
As I am showing in these blog posts, failure to do this is costly. It has cost me years of nearly complete creative block. And so, now that I’m getting free of it, I am trying to really cement these lessons for myself — and hopefully for you too!
Three challenge categories
One way of categorizing life’s challenges is by how directly you can work on them. Directly, semi-directly, or indirectly.
Category one improves direct effort. You just try harder. Many thing start out in this category. You discover you want to get serious, so you do, and things improve.
Category two challenges require a more measured and structured approach, but are amenable to direct work. You need to work on them with discipline. If you are a runner, you do this by running different drills and distances. You might get a coach to help you.
If you are a photographer, you might take a workshop in a less familiar genre or start listening to podcasts, watching videos, or reading articles and books and gleaning from them ideas that you then work on applying.
Category three challenges are not responsive to direct work at all. There may be no direct way to work on them. Or they may worsen with direct effort.
The harder I try to make something great, the further I am from doing it sometimes. Especially once that starts to be frustrating. But, if I work on it indirectly, like an athlete doing drills or physical therapy exercises, I can improve.
This tells me that, however I define success for day-to-day work, it will work better if it is not “achieve perfection,” or even, “do better than some competitor,” or, “do better than yesterday.”
In a way, these category three challenges that you can only meet indirectly are marks of progress! They only emerge when you get really serious about something for a while. So take heart.
Indirect challenges lurk at the edges
Like dragons on a Medieval map, these indirect challenges seem to hold magic power and occupy the unknown spaces. But you can meet them with courage and the right tactics.
One reason this is so hard for people is the category switch. They’ve gotten used to trying harder and then sailed into bizarre waters where effort feeds the monster, makes things worse.
It is surprising how many important things fall into this third indirect training category at least part of the time. Some seem to flicker in and out of it.
My definition of creative success needed to facilitate an indirect approach
Art is subtle. It requires practice and indirect exercises. Its challenges, at least for me, seem to be in those last two categories most of the time.
Failed work-around: inspiration
For a while, all of this was just too frustrating for me. When it got to be too much, I would put the camera down and walk away from it. Sometimes for days, but, as I’ve mentioned, sometimes for months and months.
It just seemed like I wasn’t getting anywhere. I’d throw away loads of pictures and then latch onto one and try to save it by heroic quantities of digital manipulation, only to find that it still wasn’t there.
I resolved to pick up again when I had the feeling that it would work. The difficult thing about this is that can feel like it is helping. Go awhile without creating and you might experience a burst of easy creativity when you next pick up.
But the same old challenges are there waiting. And it won’t take that long before they pounce again. Each time it is more frustrating, and the necessary time off for inspiration to return, that delay seems to get longer.
I concluded that I could not define creative success in terms of inspiration.
It is possible to err on the other side though…
Obsession with quality can drive you mad
Literally. Quality is what drove Phaedrus to mental illness in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (That’s not a spoiler. Go read it!)
Okay, maybe not everyone will go to that extreme. But I have seen that it can confine creativity in narrower and narrower strictures until it expires.
I get it. I’m a main force, hard work guy. If I want to do something, I want to accept nothing but constant improvement, and to work harder and harder until I get it.
But this is just part of the inspiration cycle. The part where I pushed until I was fighting myself.
I once got so stuck creatively that I didn’t really produce anything for years by this cycle.
Over the years, of stumbling around in the darkroom (not literally), I’ve found some exercises that work. They are small. They are simple. They may not seem like much to approach the monster of a creative block, but they work well enough. Well enough that I now define success as adhering to them.
The central realization is that quality is a byproduct of volume. Strive for volume, and, if you care about what you’re doing at all, you get quality. Try for quality and, no matter how much you care, you get less and less.
This realization urges me to define creative success in terms of volume. That is my way through.
Define creative success better
So success, for me, is just going out and making an image regardless of its quality.
If I delete everything on my memory card when I get home, it’s still a successful day. This is not stabbing the shutter button repeatedly and then sorting it out later. It is not throwing a bunch of images at the internet and seeing what spreads. Though either of those things is acceptable for a day or two — if it keeps me making images.
I want to transcend the definition I’m using, but that higher goal seems to be best served by an oblique approach. The idea isn’t that I set the bar so low that I cannot fail. The idea is that I set the bar in a way that motivates consistent practice.
Making images is the important thing. Continuous creation effort is a way of cultivating sensitivity to beauty and even refining my ability to see.
Under no circumstances do I try to force anything except that first shutter-click of the day.
Other support exercises
And if I really want to push for excellence, then what? Then I do some reading about photography science, technique, engineering, even history. Or, I might even write…
This website and my social media accounts are indirect exercises for image-making, and they are part of my purpose in photography: to help you meditate on the good.
Writing also helps me to better understand, articulate and retain what I’m learning. (Hopefully.) So you are part of the process. I hope you don’t mind. 😁
If you’ve made it this far, thanks! Consider following me on Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest or Flickr.