Maybe this will make sense at the end.
Some people set goals, some people attain goals, and some people have goals. I’m not sure I’m any one of those three.
That sounds terrible. And maybe I am forgetting or denying goals set in the past. For example a friend and I wanted to cycle down the west coast one summer. We did, more or less. It was not a goal, it was more like an ordeal, something you get yourself into and then have to negotiate to get out of. But you buy a plane ticket and basically you have to get there or not come home.
I don’t know that I ever set a goal of becoming a professional photographer. For starters, I did not know how you did that. All the compass points were in the form of book jackets and introductions, for example the Bill Allard book on his years becoming a National Geographic photographer. I got to thank him for that, by the way, last year, at a loft party at David Alan Harvey’s. He took the genuflecting well, considering. He allowed that that book had had a good response. Perhaps not what you want, it’s about the pictures isn’t it? Well, I like the pictures too. I think I forgot to say that.
I don’t know that I ever celebrated “becoming” a professional photographer. Does that still mean I am “emerging?” I have a copy of Joel Sternfeld’s “American Prospects, 1987, and on the back cover is a quote from Time magazine, it reads “Pictures that were once compelling oddities are now linked into an original meditation on the national life. It clinches the case for Sternfeld as an emerging American master.” (italics mine) I guess you can always be emerging, even when you get to be a master.
I do remember a job in the Bahamas sometime in 1999 or 2000 for W magazine where during a lunch hour break we were all in the pool and I was thinking to myself, “I should be really happy right now. Here I am.” Of course I wasn’t, I was beating myself up over the next picture or the last picture, or the next job or the last job, and feeling not secure about anything.
I don’t know that you get a triumphant moment in photography. THIS, HERE, IS THE ONE PHOTOGRAPH! FINALLY! the headline reads. I feel like Garrison Keillor, reading the News from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children, above average. I should know, having a Lutheran pastor in the family.
Photography is not something that submits itself easily to goal setting. That said though, I think it is easy to deny yourself a payoff. Think of the piles of prints you have in boxes in neat little rows somewhere in your studio. And some people don’t photograph for others, they just do it for themselves. But I think sometimes they are not being honest with themselves, don’t we all do it for recognition of one form or another?
Which brings me to Marathons. In order to run one you have to train, you have commit to four months of work and more beyond that just to be ready. In January I half decided that I was going to run the Vancouver Marathon coming May 3rd. I put the mileage on the calendar, numbers I had never seen before, and wondered if I could do it?
Well the training is over, nothing that I can do now will make much of a difference two weeks from now. I couldn’t afford the Vancouver travel, but beautiful New Jersey has a popular seaside marathon in Long Branch. It is not the perfect first marathon. But the perfect is the enemy of the good. What is the point of doing all the training, all four hundred miles, without some painful payoff?
I know some people live by goals, by to do lists, by achievements. When you look at it backwards though, it makes more sense to me. The fact that you can put something on the calendar four months away and break it down to the quotidian, as a way of getting it done. It might apply to photography too.
Thank you for writing this. You have helped clarify things for me. There is no “it” moment and how could there be? Photography is an art, open to interpretation, subject to accident. What’s praised today, is hated tomorrow and only thought great 100 years from now. You think of recognition, and even if millions of dollars came your way, and you were called “the greatest”, in the end, only the integrity you have gives any sense of peace or satisfaction.
I have been at this photography thing for over 30 years now. I’ve only ever made my living as a photographer, some times a good living, while struggling at other times. I have never felt that I reached a place that smacks of having made it. With a bit of hindsight though, I realized that I have stayed in the game.
Throughout these past years, I never lost my passion for personal work. If I do have anything to leave behind, this is it. But this work gets done only if I pursue it with discipline and persistence. The images I make for myself are my true work, and I take as much responsibility for that as I do for my paid work.
In the end, if the work does not get done I have no one to blame but myself. A career in photography is a marathon that lasts your whole life, if you want it to.