It was 39 years ago on a summer day much like today when I picked up a 35mm Voigtländer rangefinder camera at a neighbour’s garage sale. That whim would change my life, drain my bank account many times over the decades that followed, and make me a different human being than I might have been if I’d bought the tennis racquet instead.
I’m of the opinion that the things that make a good photographer also make us good humans. More alive. More patient. More willing to consider another point of view. More willing to slow down. And more willing to keep at it, whatever “it” is. Maybe that’s a photograph; maybe it’s something more important in the long run.
One of the things that keeps so many of us hanging on to a craft that is so constantly challenging seems to be the very endlessness of it: infinite challenge and infinite reward.
You could photograph your whole life (many of you have!) and still not be satisfied that you’d seen it all or got to the point with your skill that there is nothing left to learn, neither about your camera nor about yourself.
But that endless quality makes it a difficult craft to learn, much less master. And it means we’re subject to an aggressive form of the law of diminishing returns. The photographs you made last year won’t likely satisfy you next year. Over and over again, we grow past some of the delight we found in finally making that one photograph because part of the delight was the challenge—the near impossibility of exposing and focusing and composing and finally nailing the technique, light, the moment. When you do nail it, when you’ve made the photograph you had in your mind or your heart, it’s rare not to move on in search of a picture that does it all just a little more compellingly.
There’s a kind of sacred discontent in art-making; it’s a mix of reverence for what is possible, a constant longing for more, and a deep frustration at just how long it often takes to get there.
But doesn’t that make it sweeter when you make that one photograph you’ve wrestled so long to create? Doesn’t it make the joy even brighter when you surprise yourself with the image you now hold in your hands? And doesn’t that give you little slivers of hope for what you’ll feel the next time you do so, and what you’ll have seen by the time you do? Doesn’t it pull you forward, almost against your will, into new lessons and experiences?
Sometimes. Even often. But other times, it pulls me into an ennui. A low trough between the waves that are filled with “What now?” and “What next?” and all the self-doubt I can muster. Sometimes I get whiplash from the speed that it takes me to go from the peak of the wave to the low of the trough. I guess it can’t be all highs all the time. But is it just me, or does it feel like the troughs sometimes last much longer than the highs? These are the times I find myself eyeing the B&H catalogue as though a new piece of gear will pry me from my discouragement (the longer the lens, the greater the leverage, right?). Or I start looking for flights to whatever last place I found the magic, hoping it might still be there if I were to show up, new gear in tow.
Dreaming helps. But more than dreaming, it helps to get the camera in my hand and get myself in front of something—anything—where I find some wonder, which often only happens once the camera is to my eye and I’m doing the hard work of not only looking but seeing.
Years ago, I realized that my calling (for now at least) is to encourage and teach frustrated amateur photographers, by which I mean photographers whose love for the craft is matched by their desire to do it better and who see in that a challenge worth spending the time they might spend doing something easier. You could be collecting postage stamps, but here you are bashing it out with the rest of us.
This is a long journey—don’t give up. There are troughs aplenty, not only in this craft but in our lives.
And for whatever reason, these cameras give us an outlet; they open us to wonder or whatever it is you’ve found your cameras give you. The chance to encounter something bigger than yourself, perhaps. A new way of looking at and appreciating the passing of time, the light, or the people you love the most. For some, it’s a way of speaking eloquently about the world around you when you can’t otherwise find the words. For some, it’s all that and more.
If I’ve quoted her recently, forgive me, but the poet Mary Oliver said it so beautifully in “Instructions for Living a Life”:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.-Mary Oliver
That’s it, isn’t it? What more is there to say except to keep doing that? And as you do, the astonishment will grow, and the telling will become more graceful and more uniquely your own as you share it.
I can’t think of a better way to spend a life. Keep at it, my friend.
For the Love of the Photograph,
David
