the heel press

And it's true, most artists don't daydream about making great art - they daydream about having made great art.  What artist has not experienced the feverish euphoria of composing the perfect thumbnail sketch, first draft, negative, or melody - only to run headlong into a stone wall trying to convert that tantalizing hint into the finished mural, novel, photograph, sonata.  The artist's life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.

Another piece from Art & Fear.  I have to return it to the library soon but I think a trip to Powell's may be in line.

I particularly like the final line of this excerpt as it embodies a lot of the frustration I have felt at times, as well as that I have seen in most other photographers who strive to make their photography something more than it is.  We all know that success, in its varied forms, takes hard work, perseverance and often years, if not a lifetime, of dedication.  Nonetheless, this does not prevent us from oft wishing otherwise.  I am reminded of a RMSP lecture I attended once.  The lecturing photographer, Craig Tanner, gave an inspiring speech, the kind that makes you want to rush right out and accomplish your own great images.  He had just completed a coffee table book of images from Georgia that was quite impressive and I remember thinking how much I would love to do such a book.  Then he explained that (disregarding all the other years he had spent in photography) this book alone was the product of shooting around the state of Georgia exclusively for over five years.  Which sounds like a long time, but relatively speaking, considering some works of art are literally the product of a lifetime, is probably still a seductively short amount of time.

We all know that patience is a virtue in photography.  But generally when we are discussing the virtues of patience we usually are referring to short-term patience.  The kind that keeps us in a specific location taking photo after photo.  Or the kind that gets us up every day for two weeks to catch that one spot in just the right conditions.  When we discuss patience though, we rarely talk about that kind of patience that keeps us doing that over years, the kind that carries us through our dry spells and setbacks.  That allows us to push forward with the same momentum we did when the excitement of first beginning still rallied us.