ALONE BUT NEVER LONELY

Every photographer in history has been where you now are, that is, staring into a huge question mark.

By MICHAEL PERKINS

ART IS AT LEAST PARTLY PRODUCED TO BE SEEN, to act as public testimony to the artist’s ideas, a record of his having passed this way. And there is a natural need for that work to be evaluated by others, to be perceived as a common thread in the overall fabric of the human condition. I see a thing, and I  make something that comments on or interprets that thing. And I hope you see what I see.

The problem for art, though, in our increasingly public lives, becomes an exaggerated need for our work to not only be seen but to be approved of. When we post or publish in this age, we are not really looking for a debate or analysis of what we’ve created. Instead, what we seem, increasingly, to be seeking is validation. Likes. That’s a danger to any fully realized sense of art.

Art is solitary. Art is lonely. And the truest of it is generated when we trust our inner pilot light, even when, especially when, no one else “gets it”, or puts a star next to it, or tells us how wonderful we are to have made it. As artists, photographers inherit both the instinct to follow one’s own North Star and the desire to be told how much we are loved. Both urges are normal, but it is the second one which can get us into trouble. I was recently reminded of how grounded Ernst Haas, one of my very favorite photographers, always remained, how he consistently reminds us, through his writings and interviews, that the work counts all by itself, irrespective of result or reward. One quote especially echoes in my head in moments when I worry about “getting it right”:

Every work of art has its necessity; find out your very own. Ask yourself if you would do it if nobody would ever see it, if you would never be compensated for it, if nobody ever wanted it. If you come to a clear ‘yes’ in spite of it, then go ahead and don’t doubt it anymore.

We live in an age that is increasingly defined by how we are regarded by others. And that can make us pre-edit ourselves on the fly, choked by worries about how our work will “play”, as if that had anything to do with why we really do it. So, go, make pictures that may or may not ever garner you a smidgen of approbation. The essential honesty of that act will imbue your work with something that can please you beyond the power of any “like” or heart icon. And that, over time, is all you need to sustain you.