One of the mistakes I made with my since-abandoned writing career was over studying. From the time I was a kid, I read endless books about the craft of sentence making and story telling. I scoured the biographies of famous writers for their every habit and practice, as though the random minutae of a particular life were creatively meaningful, the genius transferrable. I aquired two degrees, sat through countless workshops, wrote imitations and exercises and line after line of blank verse, just for the lulz.
And in the end, the studying simply beat the love of writing out of me. All that pencil sharpening became an end unto itself. The necessary wandering one must do in the forest of creation is impossible when all you can see are the pathologies of particular trees.
When I picked up a camera again a couple of years ago, I was determined not to let the same thing happen to my relationship with photography. Some degree of study is essential, of course – my purpose here isn’t to celebrate the kind of ignorance that causes some poets to declare any 14-line poem a sonnet (for instance). But this time I intend to err on the side of enthusiasm, on the side of good enough. My purpose is to create something living, not to spend my life dissecting what others make.
This picture reminded me of that. It’s not perfect – I’m not even sure it’s a photograph in the lasting sense. It was a hip shot walking through a coffee shop; the composition is accidental, the focus is poor, the color, well, color gives me fits in general. And yet there’s something in the lady’s expression, something in the arrangment of the flat circles of light cutting across the frame. Imperfections inject life into photographs. Perhaps more than any other genre, photography is a discipline of the accidental, the happenstance.
