Three words of advice about process

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2009, Oct 25
Three words of advice about process

I recently heard these things from three different people. This first one is a paraphrase:

“I would like to do everything with 100% integrity. But sometimes I would see prints that my friends made, and when I asked them how they got it done they would say, ‘well, I sent it to such and such a lab…’ So maybe the prints weren’t perfect, but they still looked good, and they had them on paper!”

“I think you need to pay to develop as much of that film as you can afford. Do it tomorrow. Right now it’s like a clog in a drain. Creative work should be flowing through you steadily always. It seems to me that the most successful designers and artists are always producing. When you hold work in process like this, it creates attachments. How much do you hope the photos in that fridge will be great? Attachment is really dangerous; it makes it hard for you to judge the real successes and failures of your work.”

“No one is obliging you to take photographs!”

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it’s hard to force yourself to “create” but at the same time, putting yourself in certain situations will force or inspire you to take photos. even when i am not taking photos, i am thinking of ways or seeing things as if i am. one should take everything they do in life as a means of seeing things differently.. every experience contributes to what you output.

no one obliges you to shoot, but i feel obliged to shoot because it pleases me.

Posted by Dan / October 25, 2009 at 9:08 pm:

Hey Sean, thanks for the comment. I agree that it’s useful to think about how you might photograph something, even if you don’t have a camera.

The context of this remark was that I said, “I went for a couple of months without getting into a really consistent groove of shooting, like I felt when I was in Hokkaido.” So the other person was just saying, “hey, relax, when it comes, it comes, and don’t beat yourself up when it doesn’t.”

Posted by sean marc lee / October 26, 2009 at 10:01 am:

mmm yes. that context makes sense. since this is my 3rd time in Tokyo, i haven’t been shooting much at all… maybe 5 rolls of 120 in the nearly 2 weeks i’ve been here compared to the 18 rolls i shot in taiwan in the same amount of time…

however, it is hard not to beat yourself up over it. perhaps it’s because we are too conscious of not producing?

Posted by tai / November 26, 2009 at 1:55 am:

on waiting:

i have tons of rolls sitting in my fridge! i’m just excited to see what was going on in my life when i took them. it’s much more charming to wait. but that’s a surprise-nostalgia viewpoint, not a serious-photographer one.

a few months ago i developed a roll of 220 film from an ex-boyfriend; he’d had the roll (shot) for like 10 years. i was hoping some element of beauty or youth (experimentation!) would be in those photos. but no, they were all so fucking boring from start to finish, just like his latest ones. worse than lackluster. painful. if they’d been beautiful, i could’ve made some grand conclusions about how salvageable he was, or come up with an analysis of what caused him to bore into this rut (photographically and personally). in this case i’d like to think that i’d have ended things earlier had i developed the roll earlier!

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