Are our pictures any good?

I had hardly begun to read

I asked how can you ever be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don't write

From the poem Berryman, W. S. Merwin

It's not just writers, of course. The question haunts all artists, photographers included. How can you be sure what you're doing is any good?

What if you've been practicing photography for years now? What if you've been practicing photography for decades? You've even published photo books. Are your photos any good? Were your photo projects and series worth making? Or are they just so many more images splashing across eyes & screens for seconds before quickly sinking back into the vast digital ocean of billions and billions of photos made and posted each year?

The desire to express ourselves in a visual medium can be an arduous struggle at times. We may achieve recognition for one thing or another - a specific project or photo, but if we are practicing visual artists or photographers, most of the time, we're in the dark about the value of our efforts.

The act of making a photo is so simple that anyone can do it. You look (or don't even look) through a viewfinder, click a button, light blinks onto a sensor or film, and you have a picture. Done. A new image has entered the world. Can an action so simple as clicking a button produce something with lasting meaning? Are the photos we're making with such an easy process any good?

It's not like learning piano or guitar, where you can pluck a note with zero skills, but you face a relatively long journey to gain the physical dexterity to play the notes and chords that make up a song. And discordant notes in music are relatively easy for most people to register. It's as if our minds have an innate sense of melody and musical structure. Maybe because the visual world is so complex and fluid, it's not nearly so clear to us what a dissonant photograph is.

It may be easy to click a shutter, but it is hard to make a good picture. My path toward improvement and progress in my photography practice has been long and slow. Interestingly though, my realization of the level I was at as a photographer was often one step ahead of where I was, no matter where I was. When I started as a photographer, I made pictures of things like flowers, buildings, street art, etc., but when I was making these images, I always felt they were pretty good! My flower photos seemed as colorful and sharp as the flower photos I'd see other, more recognized, photographers make. Of course, now I look back at those images, and with few exceptions, they look to me now like what they actually were - amateur snapshots of flowers in a garden, random photos of skyscrapers, or graffiti.

As I improved over time, I gained new skills. I'd learn color correction, composition, a better sense of light, or how to make pictures of a more dynamic subject matter like people. As I became proficient in each new skill, my sense of confidence would once again exceed my actual abilities, a deception from my ego that I now view as a kindness. Without this inflated sense of my abilities, I might not have kept trying to make good pictures.

I've been doing this long enough now that I can finally look back at old work without a twinge of self-consciousness, but now, as I've grown better and become more committed to the pursuit of genuine artistic expression in the medium, I'm less sure than ever if any of it's any good.  

Posting our work on social media can give you a general sense of whether or not people connect with work, but looking at pictures on the phone is far from ideal, and the algorithms that control when and how our images are seen often work at cross purposes to our intentions. For reasons like these and many more, depending on feedback from social media seems like a terrible mistake. (Unless your post receives universal acclaim, in which case it's clearly the most accurate metric invented). A classic fail of social media feedback is that things like selfies or sunsets often receive far more positive feedback than our earnest artistic expression. 

Friends and family can give you a general sense if something's good, but… they're our friends and family, so how much can you trust that? 

Are our pictures any good? W.S. Merwin is correct - you're in the wrong game if that question has to be answered. In the end, I think most photographers will have to be satisfied that occasionally the darkness will be pushed back by the light they've collected in one of their images. If we want to be artists, what matters is to keep working. Keep plumbing the depths of our soul. Keep looking. Keep describing the world we see with our eyes and hearts. Keep making photos. Our role is like fireflies on a summer night, providing brief flashes of delight to anyone walking through our fields. I think that's enough. 

Class Announcement:

Starting Saturday, October 29, I'll be teaching a five-session online class called 'Questionable Pictures' that will explore the written and unwritten rules shaping the photography we create. Inspired by the book Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (Jason Fulford, Aperture, 2021), we'll explore different ideas around aesthetic and style conventions and subject matter (what can we make pictures of and what shouldn't we make pictures of? Who comes up with all these rules anyway, and how can we subvert them?) By the end, we'll be a class full of rebels, celebrating all the rules we broke along the way.

Learn More / Signup: [here]