Creative compost
My wife Wouna is currently reading a book by textile artist, Rachael Singleton, called Thinking it Through. The book deals with creativity and inspiration in the textile domain, and in art in general, and contains the following gem in discussing ‘unsuccessful’ ideas:
“Think of them like leaf-litter - they are the compost of future work.”
The idea comes from Geoffrey Petty’s book How to be better at … creativity. When Wouna read me that line, it really got me thinking about the hundreds and thousands of photos I’ve taken in my life as a photographer - many of which got deleted even before I downloaded the memory card, and many more of which never made it beyond the initial download. Often we don’t think twice about these straight-to-the-bin shots, or if we do think about them we see them as mistakes, as failures. But of course they are more than that. All the missed-focus, incorrectly exposed and badly composed images form the fertile soil, the compost, from which our best photos are born.
They may have happened as you were facing a difficult lighting situation during a shoot, and had to make some quick decisions on exposure settings. Perhaps you got it wrong, which got you thinking about the problem at hand - you fixed it, and the next time when faced with a similar challenge you nailed it. Compost.
Each time you get it wrong, it’s one more incorrect solution crossed off, one more lesson learnt. One step closer to perfection. And it is not just the technical compost making you a better, more proficient photographer - there’s also the creative compost.
Like the time you were photographing a fascinating person and you just couldn’t capture them in a way that did them justice. Or the time you were faced with a seemingly dull landscape, and for the life of you could not figure out how to coax a worthy image out of what was in front of you. All compost making us rethink and re-evaluate our creative photography process and approach, making you better at “seeing photographically” as Susan Sontag called it.
This is why forcing yourself to photograph daily is so important. The more photos we take, the bigger our supply of fertile compost - compost that feeds the creative soil from which our art grows.
I have yet to meet the photographer who improved their craft (technically and artistically) by spending their time just thinking about photography. You need to get to the doing bit - and that includes the doing-it-wrong bit.
