Failure Is Sweet

CS: “For once, and I almost feel guilty about it, I am not drawn to this as much as your other work.”

I don’t pretend to hit the bullseye (or even the target) every time, and don’t know anybody else who batted a thousand (including Shakespeare and Michaelangelo). Nor should we worry about it, or we risk taking it too seriously and getting nothing done. Better to squirt out lots of pictures and let the world pick and choose.

When you think about it, even the very best photographers (like Cartier-Bresson or Avedon or Weston) are known for a small number of super photos, maybe enough for one book or one show. Most of their work could be a clever imitation done by anybody reasonably competent. Unfortunately some folks, like Lee Friedlander, get carried away by that and substitute quantity for quality. Some balance needed.

Joe, commenting on the same photo, called it “weird in a good way.” I answered, privately:

...words I’d choose as my epitaph if I dared.

And Grant, known for soul-snatching street photography, wrote: “its beyond me.”

Not beyond, just moving off in another direction. I’m tempted to say it’s another case of Voltaire versus Rousseau, but this owes as much to the Romantics as your street shots do.

Both are escapes into esthetics. Your fly-on-the-wall slices of life are dramatic in the strictly esthetic sense – the author subtracts himself from the world and lets conjured images do the talking. This photo’s purely formal and intentionally “unreal,” making a safe nest to sit in for two minutes or so. Like many others who post here, you and I are art machines, spinning out product that gives life the illusion of purpose.

Of course we differ in deep ways. My own photos are colored by irony and nihilism, but if I had the courage of my convictions I wouldn’t bother making them at all – that’s the irony of ironies, the second derivative of futility.