Outgassing

Comments on a book of mediocre photos.

Sheesh. I'm no Cartier-Bresson, yet I'm sure some of my stuff is way above this level. It's all chance, I guess.

I've thought about this a lot over the years. Consider. If you have a relatively small population, a certain percentage of the folks who do any given thing, any art or craft or discipline of any sort, will produce decent work and maybe, if the time and place and cultural currents are right, as in Periclean Athens or Shakespeare's London, even great work, stuff that really stands the test of time, whatever that is. If you read, as I once had to do, the work of the little fish of Shakespeare's day, folks like Beaumont and Fletcher and Kyd and Greene and Peele, well... It's interesting because it's quaint, but otherwise it's pretty sorry stuff. Likewise for many Old Masters of the time of Cimabue or Giotto. Admirable, no doubt, given their limited access to antique and foreign art, but, y'know... Most of us could do as well, and many of us could do much better than the Master of Podunk. If there'd been more people for art historians to write about, those guys wouldn't even be footnotes. But they lived in little places like Quattrocento Florence or Elizabethan London or the Athens of Socrates, where the population of practicing thinkers and doers was about the same as that of a few apartment buildings in New York.

Think of a shallow pool with a certain surface. If the pool is small, rising to that surface is easy. Now think of a pool with every dimension doubled. The surface is four times as big but the volume is eight times greater. And so forth. The world you and I inhabit is like a pool with millions of times the volume of Giotto's or Plato's, and a surface that's bigger but not enormously bigger – the volume increased by the third power, the surface only by the square. People can read just so many books or watch just so many movies or go to just so many photo expos. The competition for that surface, that interface to which artists and craftsmen and others who publish something aspire, becomes enormous. You can be top-notch and still fail to rise to the surface because it's so crowded. Or you can be banal and find yourself on top just because chance favored you.

OK, if I were a big success I might not see things that way. But I'm not and I do.