When is good enough good enough?
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When it comes to the arts, two basic observations can be made:
Perfectionism is the enemy of good art.
Sloppiness is the enemy of good art.
I have the feeling that we might have an easier time agreeing on the second point. That one seems obvious.
(Bear in mind, though, that as is always the case, there might be exceptions that prove the rule.)
What about perfectionism, though? Well, perfectionism is bad for any number of reasons. These include:
Perfectionism will make you unhappy because nothing is ever good enough.
Perfectionism is a joyless affair.
Perfectionists don't tend to agree with each other. And in the rare case where they do, you can go straight back to 1 (simply imagine two or more perfectionists sitting in a bar while bitching about how imperfect everybody else is).
In the real world, perfection mostly does not exist.
We could argue about the last point (perfectionism tends to come with argumentativeness). But I'm after something a little bit larger here, namely the rather basic idea that human beings are imperfect.
In cultures such as the Japanese, this idea has become deeply embedded. For example, if you look at the originally Chinese characters called kanji, even the ones you could write in a perfectly symmetric fashion usually employ an asymmetric writing where one side is a little different than the other. In the same fashion, you do not walk through a tori gate in the very middle of the path because that's reserved for kami (deities or spirits). You might be familiar with the general idea of embracing imperfection through wabi-sabi.
Ignoring the aspect of art for a minute, I find this idea comforting. Beauty, it tells us, can only be had if you ditch perfectionism and instead aim for what appears beautiful even though it is explicitly not perfect.
The former physicist in me hates the idea (physicists love symmetry). But he also knows that the Universe itself is governed by imperfection: if the Universe were completely symmetric, there would be as much matter as anti-matter. If this were true in every locale in the Universe, we would not be here (matter and anti-matter destroy each other create energy). There might be world somewhere else that consist entirely of anti-matter. But we have no indication so far that such worlds exist. So at some stage very early in the Universe, symmetry must have been broken (there's a theory about this, in case you're curious).
Thus, if even the Universe is asymmetric and thus imperfect (at least according to physicists' ideas that symmetry is the ideal in Nature), then why should we be perfect or strive for perfection?
But I also noticed that we don't want to be sloppy. Sloppiness is just not beautiful. This is where it gets tricky (and interesting).
Here is an example: at the end of every year, a single kanji is chosen in Japan to represent the past 12 months. Here's an example, the kanji for 2023. You want to at least briefly click on the link, because I want you to see the picture at the top. It shows the kanji "zei", written by Seihan Mori, the chief Buddhist priest of Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto. It's actually rather beautiful. However, it also looks a bit messy. But then, messy isn't the right word. It's something else. For sure, it isn't sloppy.
This is a good example for what I meant when I wrote about finding the right spot between perfection and sloppiness. If you learn Japanese calligraphy (which I personally have no interest in), that's the end goal: to be able to write in this particular fashion.
Let's get back to photography. By construction, photography lends itself to perfectionism a lot more than to sloppiness. It's a technical medium, meaning you can always continue to fiddle with any of the (literal or metaphorical) knobs to make things a little bit better.
When it comes to art, though, the key is to find the spot when you stop, when, in other words, good enough is good enough. That's where the craft aspect stops, and you're only left with art.
Note that were you to evaluate a photograph, talking about "good" and "bad" would involve more than one aspect. There's good craft and bad craft, and there's good art and bad art. Good craft does not guarantee good art, but bad craft typically entails bad art. (See?! There's no symmetry there, either!)
Good craft is maybe best exemplified with the photographs made by Ansel Adams. They're impressive. They're even beautiful in their own ways. But they're ultimately completely soulless. They telegraph their makers' craft -- mostly because Adams wanted it that way.
Bad craft might maybe be exemplified by Daidō Moriyama's most extreme Provoke work, let's say Bye-Bye Photography. The book was intentionally made in such a fashion that all rules of what was (and still is) considered good photo craft were violated. It's actually an interesting book. But ultimately, it's as soulless as Adams' work (albeit in different ways): it feels like a tiresome shtick.
Every photographer's personal task thus is to find the right spot in between perfection and sloppiness where they think their photographs work the best. Finding it entails a lot of hard work.
The work is hard in part because on the one hand, you have to push yourself to do better, craft-wise, than you might have the temperament for. On the other hand, you somehow have to find the sweet spot where you stop, where good enough is good enough because the work sings. Any step further would destroy the magic.
In my decade of teaching, this aspect of photography never came up. Typically, perfectionism was being taught. There were endless discussions about the "best" inkjet paper, the "best" developer for your film, the "best" camera... You get the point. The "best" was the end goal.
That's not how you make good art.
Thus, how do you become an artist if you strive for the perfection your (old-school) teachers wanted to instill in you, when it's exactly your striving for perfection that's preventing you from fucking up, from making beautiful mistakes, from finding your own sweet spot on that spectrum that has perfection and sloppiness at its extreme end points?
I've thought about this many, many times, possibly because when I was teaching, I never had the opportunity to bring it up (as someone who hadn't studied photography and who hadn't gone to Yale, I was usually not taken quite as seriously as the rest of the crew). If perfectionism was addressed, then it was only at the point where the work already was perfect. Sure, you could make it even more perfect; but the added work would stand in no relation to the added improvement.
I've known from writing for years and from making things that in order to succeed I would have to find my own solution for how to approach all of this. Everything can always be better; but the right moment has to be found where added perfection starts sucking the life out of the project in question.
To be honest, I don't know how to describe where that point is. I'm not even convinced that you have to know. All you have to know is that you need to stop yourself when things could be better, but they're good enough: you have to be able to stop your perfectionism. What's more important is to know that something could be a lot better when things aren't good enough at all.
As a consequence, I'm really hard with myself when it comes to making things. For example, I will post-process every single photograph I take to give it its final form -- even if huge numbers of those pictures never get used.
In the past, I had arguments with a number of students who told me they didn't want to put in the work with pictures before they knew whether they actually wanted to use them. That's amateurism of the highest order! Why do you go to an expensive MFA program when you want to practice sloppiness?
All of that... Well, no: the basic premise of the above came up a few days ago when I was sitting in front of my computer while doing work. The work day hadn't ended, and yet I felt that I needed to take a picture. Waiting for the end of the day was no option, given the setting sun. Stopping work was no option, because bills had/have to be paid.
I decided to take a picture of the corner of my new desk in front of the corner of the nook it is placed in with my iPhone.
The idea was to print the picture using my Instax printer, put the print into that corner and take another picture (this obviously is a really stupid photo exercise, but I needed to do something. Sometimes, stupid little exercises can be all it takes.):
The outcome of my exercise left me unsatisfied. It's just sloppy. But in that moment, I didn't have the time to do better.
It was later, in the evening, that my dissatisfaction had me go back to my office, take out my real camera and take another picture.
Because at that point I still didn't have internet at home, so I had to wait until the next day to be able to print the picture, put it into the corner, and then take the second picture:
It's still a stupid exercise. And the picture could still be better. You'll notice how the printer has a slight colour cast, I could angle the print a little better...
But this is good enough now, given what it was intended to be. While thinking about making it better, I remembered what ultimately would go into all the words I wrote above. And I figured that if I had those words, then that would be the right outcome of this exercise.
A few links to conclude this email:
"The artworld, in its comfortable form," writes Suraj Yengde, "has restricted itself to performing as a courtesan to a select economically or socially privileged few. Art exists to create a connoisseur class; the larger audience, the general public, is thought to be incapable of comprehending the apparently nonsensical dilemmas presented to them. And the international artworld, as it is constituted at present, doesn’t care. Or have to care. It’s obvious how this might chime with those belonging to an outcaste class."
There's much to be learned from this interview with Yuri Yuan, especially if you're a student: "My top priority is to make sure I have good work. My work is the foundation. If I do not have the work, I can socialize every day, but it still will not get me anywhere. No one is blind."
Lastly, this comic made me really sad. Go, look at it, and get sad, too.
Down the street, in my new neighbourhood. It's not the first photograph I took here, but it's the first photograph I really felt I needed to make here.
And with that I will conclude for today. As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg