For some time I have been thinking of writing about a particular challenge that comes with doing creative work. It is a complicated subject, but sometimes writing about such a topic “primes the pump” for further consideration, so in this post I’m going to take a first — and almost stream-of-consciousness — look at the issue.
(As such, don’t expect a complete coverage here. That would take a book. Or several books. And I’m not about to write them! Also, I’ve updated this post by adding a wonderful reference to the subject through the perspective of composer John Adams.)
The day after writing this I read an article about composer John Adams, in which he responds to essentially the same question that I’m dealing with here:
While many things may be gained from experience, Adams says he is sot sure if the very act of composing gets any easier with age.
”It depends on the day you ask me. Today, I could say it’s very difficult. But I can say that the one benefit of growing older is that you have a personal history of your own struggles. “
“If you have fought the battle in the past, when you have a block, you know it likely will not last, if you keep working. When you’re thirty years old, or twenty five years old, and you have a block, you think that’s the end of the world. You just can’t imagine success for yourself. So that’s the only thing I can say.”
It has been my good fortune to live and work in and around two creative fields: music and photography. (For those don’t know, my academic background is in music and I had a long career as a college music faculty member.) I have had plenty of opportunities to observe and experience the creative life, with all of its rewards and challenges. It is the relationship between some of the rewards and challenges that will figure in what follows.
If you do creative work, it is almost certain that you hope to experience the intense “high” that may come with it, a kind of intensity and exhilaration. Perhaps you have felt that in the work of others and you hope the work you create will evoke that response. You want to feel the sense of competence and even transcendence that can come from successful work. Perhaps you want to be like creatives who have influenced you.
If you work at it — and perhaps if you have natural inclination and/or talent — there’s a very good chance that you’ll experience these feelings from your own work and perhaps even feel a kind of confirmation when others respond to it. This is a good thing!
But it is also that starting point for an intrinsic challenge for creatives, a challenge that has several complex layers and which can easily counteract the positive experiences. I’d like to look at a few of those and perhaps even consider some ways that artists I know seem to respond to them.
As a college faculty member, I recall an old story that is passed around about new faculty members. I’ll paraphrase:
On the first day of the first term the brand new faculty member meets the senior faculty member in the office next door just before heading off to meet their very first class. “I’m a bit nervous about how this will go,” says New Faculty Member. Senior Faculty Member is reassuring and sends New Faculty Member off to class with encouragement.
Two hours later New Faculty Member returns and Senior Faculty Member asks, “Well, how did it go?” New Faculty Member says, “It was great! The class was attentive! They all seemed to follow along! There were great questions! I was totally on top of the subject! Everything was…” Suddenly a cloud passes over New Faculty Member’s face. “I just realized that I told them everything I know and I have to do it again tomorrow!”
Let me translate that to photography. (Note that this issue is not entirely photography-specific!) You acquired some decent equipment. You’ve admired the photography of others, trying to understand and learn from it. You made a lot of photographs, many of which seem OK but unremarkable. (More on that in a moment.) Then one day it all comes together, and you make a photograph this is better than anything you’ve done before. People notice and say very nice things about it. You feel confirmation of your skills and your vision, that you have moved into the realm of “real photographers.” It does — and it should — feel great.
But now you have to do it again tomorrow.
The fact is that for every really good photograph, almost all photographers make a whole lot of middling, OK, not bad photographs that are, honestly, pretty forgettable. This is not a criticism of anyone’s work. It is just a fact. The remarkable photographs don’t come easily nor frequently. (Ansel Adams famously noted that “a dozen a year” is a good crop.)
So, you continue making photographs. They are at least as good as the work you were generally doing before but that means that most of them fall below the standard of that one brilliant photograph you created, the one that now defines success. Doubts creep in.
Perhaps it was just luck, and you have no real talent. Perhaps it wasn’t luck, but you have “lost it!” Perhaps all of those people who said the earlier photograph was great were just humoring you, or perhaps they just were not really all that perceptive. The term for this feeling is “imposter’s syndrome,” something almost universally experienced by artists, even very good artists, and artists who would rather not talk about it.
And it is even worse than that. Let’s say you make another photograph (as you are almost certainly capable of doing) that matches level of quality that you achieved in that previous one. Success, right? Well, yes, but because you have now had that experience of creating something better than anything you created before… achieving that same level no longer produces the same intense feelings that it did the first time. To get that you must produce something even better than that earlier triumph!
Meanwhile, as is the norm among photographers, you continue to make a lot of photographers, and the vast majority of them (as is true for essentially all photographers) are just… OK. Some are failures. You try new things and — no surprise! — not all of them work. More failure.
This point in the never-ending loop of the creative process is a danger zone of doubt and insecurity. There’s nothing wrong with your work, but this process will naturally challenge your sense of accomplishment and self-worth. (Some will suggest that they don’t think this loop exists, but my impression is that they have just found ways to compartmentalize it… as their way of dealing with it.)
The first step, I think, is to realize what this process is, that it exists, that it is essentially an unavoidable feature of doing creative work — to recognize that it is more about that process than about you or your own work.
The second step is to figure out how to contend with this fact of the creative life. I’m fairly certain that there is not one right answer, as I have known artists who deal with this reality in a variety of ways that range from healthy and effective to very unhealthy and quite damaging. I’m not here to sort through all of those — just to point out that thinking about your response is important, perhaps critically so. I’m also not here to claim that responding to this reality is easy. In truth, it often is extremely difficult, even when you understand what is going on and know some strategies for responding.
The range of responses is fascinating. Some will deny (occasionally vehemently) that it is an issue at all — which may well be their way of dealing with this issue. A few even get angry about raising the issue. Some come to an accommodation with a certain level of discomfort and decide that it is just how it goes. Some beat themselves up over it, often focusing on unfavorable comparisons of their own work to that of others. Others just give up. Some recognize the cycle and develop a level of acceptance of the slow times, working patiently until the good work returns. Many put one foot in front of the other and “just do the work,” expecting that the steady effort will be rewarded.
I’m not going to offer The Answer here — mainly because, as I noted early on, I don’t think there is one correct answer. But a first useful step, I think, is recognizing that this experience is a natural, even inevitable part of the creative process — it is ab out the process, not about you. There’s nothing wrong or unusual about feeling frustrated. A second useful step is trying to figure out your best way to deal with this reality.
(I’m pushing out this post without fulling editing at this point, so don’t be surprised to see a few errors now and to see a few corrections, additions, and other sorts of editing later on.)
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
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Jackson, that point about a run of several months coming to an end is an important one. I probably need to more explicitly address that as being among the forms these issues take.
I’ve certainly had that happen, as has essentially every single photographer I have ever known. Sometimes it just comes easily, and good stuff comes in groups. And then, for no clear reason, the tap gets turned off — or so it seems — and not much happens.
I always think of a talk by Huntington Witherill that I attended some years ago. He is a wonderful photographer who earlier created beautiful black and white photographs in the lineage, or so its seems to me, of the West Coast Landscape photographers in the Weston/Adams continuum. But he has also gone far afield from that kind of work, and I happened to see it at an exhibit at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel where they were showing a group of his highly manipulated and very imaginative color photographs of flowers.
After the talk connects with the show, my recollection is that someone essentially asked him where this was likely to go in the future. He paused a moment and, more or less, said that this body of work seemed to have run its course and he wasn’t quite sure what would come next… but that he was confident that something would come to him.
That seems like a kind of confidence and patience born of going through the inevitable cycles of creativity many times. I think of it every time that I get temporarily blocked.
But you are right, it is “no fun at the time.” And figuring out how to deal with the inevitable “no fun” periods is important.
Dan
Good stuff, G. Dan. I’ll certainly admit to struggling with it, although to me it’s less a matter of following up a good image or two, but rather dealing with it when a run of a few excellent months of image making comes to an end. I guess my response is basically the last you mention: “Some recognize the cycle and develop a level of acceptance of the slow times, working patiently until the good work returns.” It gets easier once you’ve been through it a few times. Perhaps worth mentioning, though, is that it can coincide with other life changes (e.g. moving) and snowball into a really rough mood. My first six months or so after leaving the Eastern Sierra for Washington had me wondering if I was ever going to be inspired by landscapes again. It passed, and the whole experienced pushed my work forward, but it was no fun at the time.