See on Scoop.it – Forty Two: Life and Other Important Things
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We Need Our Audiences
This week’s column by Ctein
I know lots of authors, artists, and singer/songwriters. When we get together we talk about the creative process in remarkably similar ways. I’ve no doubt that my feelings and reactions are not universal (everyone differs) but they cut broadly across ages, media, and genres. What we all seem to need is an outside audience.
What got me thinking on this particular path was spending a chunk of time a few years back hanging, to my serious delight, with the brilliant and talented Kathy Li (who few of you have heard of and fewer have seen, since she doesn’t have a website of her work, damn her eyes, and I’ll be getting to that). Among many talents, she’s an avid amateur photographer*. On one afternoon, she showed me a candid portrait of me she’d made that I really liked; it is very much one of the more successful efforts at capturing me that anyone has done. Perhaps only DDB and Kyle Cassidy have done better. Then she showed me an extraordinarily evocative photograph of a luminescent red tide that had me intensely staring at her itty bitty iPod Touch for minutes.
You can’t see her work, because she hasn’t bothered to put together an online gallery. She doesn’t think she’s very good. But really, how bad can someone be if they show me two photographs I like that much in one afternoon? I mean, I ain’t the ultimate arbiter of taste, but I’ve got a bit of an eye. It can’t be crap. But, nah, she doesn’t think she’s worthy.
Another friend freezes up in the face of potential sales. He’s a good photographer. Intellectually, he knows he’s a good photographer. He’s not as divorced from reality as Kathy. But when it comes to selling his stuff, he makes me look like Steve Jobs, and I am pretty bad at this, truly I am. He doesn’t even have to dither over what to offer. People have already asked for his work. He just has to put it out there. It would do his ego immeasurable good. He always has an excuse. They’re palpably stupid and illogical excuses…to everyone except him. I’m convinced that on some level, he just doesn’t feel like he’s good enough to deserve an audience. Which is bulls*$#. And irrelevant.
Most artists have good days and bad days. Mostly we have meh days. Good enough, but…. And that’s when all the doubts creep in. Oh, there are those good days. I have actually made a handful of dye transfer prints in my life that I think are perfect. 99.9% of them, not so much; I can see a wart, a flaw, in design, composition, execution, something that keeps it from being ideal. I grit my mental teeth just a bit and move on. Same with my writing. I’ve written a few columns that were effortless and as perfect as I’ll ever write. My Jim Marshall eulogy and my Photo-Fetishist columns were like that. They just sprang, full-blown, from the brow of my muse on to the screen, almost as fast as I could dictate them, and they sang. Why? I dunno, ask my Muse. Maybe her Muse inspired her. Maybe it was just the right cup of tea that morning. Or maybe the phase of the moon. Whatever, she was rockin’.
Other times, she’ll just churn out the words, and I’ll find myself writing four, maybe five, thousand words in a day, because I won’t want to be doing anything else, and they’ll be fine, but not perfect. Good enough. And sometimes it’s a horrible slog; she doesn’t want to write, and I don’t want to write, but it has to get written. Then it gets reworked and rereworked into some tolerable semblance of publishability, and off it goes.
Except for those incredibly rare shining moments, whether it’s photography or writing, it feels only good enough. That’s where it starts to go off the rails. Because any even-semi-successful artist is one of their own worst critics.
This is not a character flaw; this is not an insecurity; it is not something that can be fixed by good therapy (or drugs). It is a necessary part of our success. We need to be more critical than most our our audience, so that we can be sure of getting rid of all the warts that they would notice. That’s the way to be sure (well, hemi-demi-semi-sure) that they will enjoy the experience we’re handing them. We have to be better than them; it’s what they’re paying us for.
Consequently, those of us who toil mostly in isolation, mostly in the company of our own minds, witty and entertaining as that company may be, mostly live with our own very worst critic. We lack perspective. That can only be provided by others.
I can recall, back when I was printing Jim Marshall’s photographs, that I reached a point where I started to doubt the quality of my work. Printing the same photographs repeatedly, I became intimately familiar with every single flaw and failing they contained. It’s not that the prints were bad or anything like that, but to my eye they didn’t look terribly good. In the back of my brain there was this nagging little thought, “Gee, I can’t believe Jim is willing to pay me so much money for prints like these.” Intellectually I knew that there wasn’t anyone else likely to be able to make better prints for him, but, still, the work I was turning out wasn’t making me feel very good.
Then one of the galleries in San Francisco mounted a major retrospective of Jim’s photography, the black-and-white work being represented by platinum prints and the color, of course, by my dye transfer prints. I went to the opening and for the first time saw a substantial body of those prints in their proper venue: nicely framed, well lit, and being admired by hundreds of attendees. Suddenly, I could slip into their heads and see the prints the way they were seeing them, and I realized that, damn, I’m good. I mean really, really good! Which is what everyone else had been telling me, but I’d been losing the ability to see it for myself.
That’s why artists need audiences.
©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved
*(Author’s note: turns out there’s also a Kathy Li who is a professional photographer in London—that’s a different one.)
For anyone who writes, blogs, creates … this is an insightful, well-written article to which we can all relate.
See on theonlinephotographer.typepad.com
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- We Need Our Audiences (theonlinephotographer.typepad.com)
- Art is a Popularity Contest, Not a Democracy (theonlinephotographer.typepad.com)
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Categories: Arts, Blogging, Media, photo, Photography, Writing
There is a book that I am reading right now called – Writing in Flow. I read about it on Otto’s site (he is a photographer). Not all things written or created come from that place of ease you speak of but they can. Once those flood gates open and are fed by that je ne sais quois 🙂 or flow then it becomes much easier to produce right from the very heart. Producing from the heart with the mind as a back-up has given me my best work. It has taken me almost 5 years to be able to expose myself, faults and all. The most surprising thing, until I read Writing in Flow, was that the pieces that caused me the least grief (the ones that didn’t get over-worked) are the ones that came out best.
Artists, especially multi ones do have a hard time with getting the word out because it is so damn time consuming that little time is left to create!
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Yes. I am finding time is no longer my friend. Because I was a writer first, I tend to as you say, to overwork things and sometimes, after much labor, toss them and don’t use them anyway. The photography is much easier for me. I don’t over think it. I may over process sometimes, but it’s easy enough to go back and start over, unlike writing. I’m also terrible at taking a compliment. Are we all that bad or is it me? It isn’t false modesty, or at least I don’t think so. It’s more like a compelling need to point out the flaws lest I be cheating somehow. Creation is a very strange process and we who do it are odd people. To say the very least.
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Good one, Mrs. A! I think you could go to same scene several days in a row and come up with vastly different shots. Depends on your eyes, mindset and heart. I must confess this: Even when I’m not really enthusiastic at the start of a photo shoot, something changes within me almost automatically and the eyes, mind and heart take over.
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We could be great … a husband and wife team of talent 🙂
On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 11:18 AM, SERENDIPITY
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I think that we are collectively hard on ourselves – always comparing what we produce to our best work and so compliments may feel uncomfortable because of that. Someone suggested posting what you may consider mediocre or poor work to see responses. This is a tough exercise but it does produce surprising results. Similarly keeping your torn-up work for a few months rather than destroying it forever may upon reflection turn out to be much better than you originally perceived it to be. When emotion is involved all sorts of magic happens 😀
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One of the big pluses that’s come from daily blogging is I’m not nearly as judgmental as I was. I have — finally — accepted each photo and every post is not going to be the best I’ve ever written, but even the worse aren’t so terrible. I can stop beating myself up. And I actually toss posts and never publish them, often big long ones that I’ve worked hard at but somehow they never became cohesive. An idea lurked but never saluted. Lately, I think my best stuff is shorter, more focused. As for the pictures? Sometimes I love them so much I want to hug them. But about my processing? THAT is another story. I still am limping along on the technical trail and my toes are sore from stubbing 🙂
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I work in isolation too, and am terrible, absolutely terrible at promoting or marketing, and so it piles up …
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If it weren’t for the automated functions provided by WordPresss, nobody except my own friends would have heard of me. Ironically, because I play a game on FB that requires a lot of connections — Metropolis — otherwise, I would have never reached anyone. Irony. I think many — maybe most — artists aren’t great publicists … but some are. Some are very good at it. It’s a different skill set, though, like writing blurbs. I’m very grateful for “Publicize!”
On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 10:33 PM, SERENDIPITY
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