Make A Lot of It

I’m certainly not a chef, but whenever I’m asked what the “key ingredient” is to making good photographs, good ART, the answer I give is a simple one: make a lot of it.

We often talk about how vision is everything, but vision doesn’t come from the womb full grown and mature. It’s cultivated. And that cultivation takes time and effort. Certainty and control might be your friends while performing surgery, but they are not your friends here.

While some people might mistake my suggestion of repetition and productivity with ‘thoughtless’ production, it couldn’t be further from what I mean. In reality, it’s usually through producing art that ideas get brought to fruition. You’re working your way through fear, through vagueness, through the numbers, the details, the soul of it. It’s through this process that we find what we’re looking for.

Tolstoy re-wrote War & Peace 8 times (by hand) before he got it right.

Michael Jordan has missed 26 game winning shots.

I could go on, but you get the point.

“Making art is like beginning a sentence before you know it’s ending. The risks are obvious: you may never get to the end of the sentence at all – or having gotten there, you may not have said anything. This is probably not a good idea in public speaking, but it’s an excellent idea in making art.” – from the book Art & Fear

[Btw, if you haven’t read the book Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
, you’re missing out. The book was first gifted to me by a photographer I met on the road named Bryce Boyer. Thx B.]